In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Diderot philosopheTimo KaitaroColas Duflo. Diderot philosophe. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2003. Pp. 543. Cloth, € 85,00.Diderot's thought has often been believed to be full of incoherencies and paradoxes, lacking the unity characteristic of philosophical systems. It is true that he preferred the form of a dialogue to that of a systematic treatise and that his ideas on a specific subject tend to be dispersed in a variety of philosophical, (...) literary or epistolary texts. However, the different pieces fit together nicely, if one has the patience to put them together. In his new monograph Colas Duflo manages to show the coherence and unity of Diderot's philosophy, not only by showing the consistency of the philosopher's thought on epistemological, aesthetical and moral subjects separately, but also by showing the close interdependence of different aspects of his philosophical inquiry and their grounding in his biological materialism.Before the author examines Diderot's philosophy proper, he introduces the reader to Diderot's manner of writing and shows how the literary forms in which the encyclopedist presented his philosophy are indistinguishable from its content. Diderot did not write dialogues just in order to present in a palatable and entertaining form a philosophy that could well have been presented in erudite treatises. Dialogue was the original form of Diderot's thought. It helped him to distance himself from his thoughts and to put his ideas in a dialogue with each other, instead of systematizing them. In his dialogues the truth is approached by multiplying perspectives instead of being viewed from a central perspective which unifies the various points of view in one vision. Reminding the reader of this aspect of Diderot's philosophy is important. One would look in vain for the traditional mouthpiece of the truth among the protagonists of his dialogues; and this is true even in cases when he stages himself among them.Colas Duflo starts his discussion of Diderot's philosophy by examining the philosopher's complex and changing relation to metaphysical finalism in his first philosophical works. Duflo also lets this theme of finalism run through the book as the main thread, which provides a coherent framework for the treatement of the different aspects of Diderot's philosophy. The presentation of Diderot's early writings situates these works in their contemporary context and manages to reveal the internal logic of Diderot's development from a finalist deist to an antifinalist atheist in a convincing manner. The chapter dealing with Le rêve de d'Alembert provides a careful and well-thought-out reading of this work and shows the originality of Diderot's biological materialism, which has really nothing to do with the mechanism sometimes falsely attributed to him (and to La Mettrie). Diderot's thought was not so much rooted in the mechanical world-view as it was in the sciences of life of his time. In relation to the problem of unity vs. multiplicity in Diderot's organicistic materialism, Duflo tends to emphasize multiplicity. One could, in fact, with as much reason, argue the opposite and put the emphasis on unity. But this is perhaps a matter of taste, since Diderot's originality lies in fact in his ability to take into account both aspects of the organisms by describing the continuing tensions between unifying and disrupting forces at work within them.The part of the book dealing with aesthetics places the encyclopedist's theory of taste in the context of his materialism. The interpretations proposed are convincing although one has to take account of the fact that Duflo uses the word "spontaneous," not in its usual sense referring to immediate and unreflected reactions, but rather as a synonym of innate [End Page 498] (see 303). Diderot emphasized the former but denied the latter. The juxtaposition of Diderot's aesthetics with that of Kant provides some enlightening insights into both. From taste one passes fluently to Diderot's moral philosophy: according to Diderot moral judgements resemble those of taste in so far as they are often as spontaneous as the latter. And despite this they are not innate but based on experience.The chapters dealing with the moral and political philosophy of... (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article provides the first comprehensive and chronological analysis of Carl Schmitt’s reception of Carl von Clausewitz. While earlier scholarship has mostly stressed Schmitt’s shift from Clausewitzian ‘instrumentality’ to an ‘existential’ view of war, I note some inherent difficulties in this dichotomy and instead promote the parallel distinction between two argument types: those of containment and intensification. Schmitt theorized both limited political war and the intensification of war out of traditional bounds, and focusing on one should not eclipse the other. (...) Further, both elements are identifiable already in Clausewitz. I analyse Schmitt’s oscillation between containment and intensification arguments chronologically from the mid-1920s to the 1960s. Despite sometimes nominally rejecting Clausewitz’s famous thesis of war as the continuation of politics, Schmitt nevertheless affirmed the idea of war’s political nature. I conclude that Schmitt’s view can be read as a radicalized version of the Clausewitzian political theory of war rather than a strict deviation from it. This becomes evident as soon as we place Schmitt’s partly incoherent observations on Clausewitz in their argumentative contexts. (shrink)

In Vagaries of Desire, Timo Airaksinen develops a new philosophical account of desire understood as mental state that focuses on a desirable possible world. Literary and philosophical themes, including sexuality, are discussed in terms of their metaphoric and metonymic features.

Among many things, Simmel in his Philosophy of Money works out a cultural perspective on money. In reference to socio-historical examples, Simmel differentiates between the »Substanzwert« of those objects, which serve monetary purposes: Whereas the former quality stands for the equalization of material attributes and value, the later describes money's capability for universal exchange. With Ernst Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, we can argue that this a »revolution of the way of thinking«: Drawing a parallel between Simmel's »Sustains-« and »Funktionswert« (...) and Cassirers »Ausdrucks-« und »Darstellungsfunktion« does not only point out characteristics of each thinkers cultural philosophy. It also shows how an argument for a monetary understanding of the world – money as a symbolic form – can be developed. (shrink)

In Reinhart Koselleck's history of concepts, the general orientation that concepts are to be understood in their proper contexts is intertwined with the assumption that they are manifestations of particular political conflicts. The essay shows that the dense compound of context and conflict in Koselleck's thought springs from Carl Schmitt's political theory and also forms an important point of continuity between Koselleck's early work and his later methodological writings. The formalized assumption of conflict, somewhat problematically, binds Koselleckian conceptual history to (...) a particular conception of politics, one that sees politics ultimately as struggle and conflict. Once the historical-theoretical contingency of this conception is recognized, it becomes both possible and necessary to reassess the role of conflict in the methodology of conceptual history. (shrink)

The article analyzes the work of Hanno Kesting, Reinhart Koselleck, Roman Schnur, and Nicolaus Sombart—four young followers of Carl Schmitt in postwar Germany. Their “intellectual Schmittianism” was less than a full commitment to Schmitt’s political positions, yet had more than an arbitrary similarity with them: it pertained to assumptions, categories, and modes of thought. Drawing on Pocock’s terminology, I identify a particular “language” of intellectual Schmittianism, introduce its key components, and analyze their interaction. I focus on six categories derived from (...) Schmitt’s narrative of European political modernity: discrimination, historical parallels, secularization, global civil war, open/latent civil war, and category blurs. The analysis shows that these categories were interlinked argumentative devices rather than mere rhetoric and that they systematically upheld the postwar scholars’ arguments. While the Schmittian language enabled the young scholars to express their political skepticis... (shrink)

Contemporary proponents of modern Buddhism argue that the Buddha’s teaching, in contrast to later Buddhist-inspired philosophies and folklore, is of a fundamentally therapeutic or experiential character. In response, other scholars have objected that this amounts to an inadequate protestantization that neglects soteriology and the broader religious or cultural context. In this paper, by critically engaging with therapeutic readings (as proposed by Stephen Batchelor) and experiential readings (as proposed by Alan Wallace and D. T. Suzuki) and by drawing from a few (...) significant early Pāli discourses, I reconstruct the Buddha’s teaching in a way that, like many modern interpretations, does not rely on belief in magical powers and spirits but that, unlike many modern interpretations, does not exhaust itself in mere therapeutics or experiential knowledge. My interpretation is grounded in a notion of negative self-knowledge that takes two distinct forms. On the one hand, there is the self-knowledge of not-self as an antecedent recognition of the possibility of awakening that defines the Buddhist seeker. On the other hand, there is the acquired self-knowledge of not-self of the awakened. The latter—that is, the completed insight into what we are not—is not just one experience among others but the transformation of any possible experience. Thus, the Buddha speaks to us of his self-knowledge that exceeds experiential knowledge. This imbalance between the Buddha and his real or potential interlocutors explains why his teaching remains inaccessible to many, in spite of modern attempts to rationalize it. (shrink)

We introduce a framework for a graph-theoretic analysis of the semantic paradoxes. Similar frameworks have been recently developed for infinitary propositional languages by Cook and Rabern, Rabern, and Macauley. Our focus, however, will be on the language of first-order arithmetic augmented with a primitive truth predicate. Using Leitgeb’s notion of semantic dependence, we assign reference graphs (rfgs) to the sentences of this language and define a notion of paradoxicality in terms of acceptable decorations of rfgs with truth values. It is (...) shown that this notion of paradoxicality coincides with that of Kripke. In order to track down the structural components of an rfg that are responsible for paradoxicality, we show that any decoration can be obtained in a three-stage process: first, the rfg is unfolded into a tree, second, the tree is decorated with truth values (yielding a dependence tree in the sense of Yablo), and third, the decorated tree is re-collapsed onto the rfg. We show that paradoxicality enters the picture only at stage three. Due to this we can isolate two basic patterns necessary for paradoxicality. Moreover, we conjecture a solution to the characterization problem for dangerous rfgs that amounts to the claim that basically the Liar- and the Yablo graph are the only paradoxical rfgs. Furthermore, we develop signed rfgs that allow us to distinguish between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ reference and obtain more fine-grained versions of our results for unsigned rfgs. (shrink)

This article analyzes the compound of the categories of secularization and reoccupation in its variations from Hans Blumenberg's philosophy to Carl Schmitt's political theory and, ultimately, to Reinhart Koselleck's conceptual history. By revisiting the debate between Blumenberg and Schmitt on secularization and political theology with regard to the political-theoretical aspects of secularization and the methodological aspects of reoccupation, I will provide conceptual tools that illuminate the partly tension-ridden elements at play in Koselleck's theorizing of modernity, history, and concepts. For Schmitt, (...) secularization is inherently related to the question of political conflict, and, correspondingly, he attempts to discredit Blumenberg's criticism of secularization as an indirectly aggressive, and thereby hypocritical, attempt to escape the political. To this end, I argue, Schmitt appropriates Blumenberg's concept of “reoccupation” and uses it alternately in the three distinct senses of “absorption,”“reappropriation,” and “revaluation.” Schmitt's famous thesis of political concepts as secularized theological concepts contains an unmistakable methodological element and a research program. The analysis therefore shows the relevance of the Blumenberg/Schmitt debate for the mostly tacit dialogue between Blumenberg and Koselleck. I scrutinize Koselleck's understanding of secularization from his early Schmittian and Löwithian theory of modernity to his later essays on temporalization of history and concepts. Despite Blumenberg's criticism, Koselleck holds onto the category of secularization throughout, but gradually relativizes it into a research hypothesis among others. Simultaneously, Koselleck formalizes, alongside other elements, the Schmittian account of reoccupation into his method of conceptual analysis and uses the term in the same three senses—thus making “reoccupation” conceptually compatible with “secularization,” despite the former notion's initial critical function in Blumenberg's theory. The examination highlights a Schmittian residue that accounts for Koselleck's reserved attitude toward Blumenberg's metaphorology, regardless of a significant methodological overlap. (shrink)

Growing ecological problems have raised the need for conceptual tools dedicated to studying semiotic processes in cultural-ecological systems. Departing from both ecosemiotics and cultural semiotics, the concept of an ecosemiosphere is proposed to denote the entire complex of semiosis in an ecosystem, including the involvement of human cultural semiosis. More specifically, the ecosemiosphere is a semiotic system comprising all species and their umwelts, alongside the diverse semiotic relations (including humans with their culture) that they have in the given ecosystem, and (...) also the material supporting structures that enable the ecosemiosphere to thrive. Drawing parallels with Juri Lotman’s semiosphere concept, the ecosemiosphere is characterized by its heterogeneity, asymmetry, and boundedness. But unlike Lotman’s concept, the ecosemiosphere is not characterized by an overall boundedness, that is, by the presence of external binary boundaries and the shared identity arising from this unity. The involvement of human culture in the ecosemiosphere manifests in interspecies dialogues and semiotic engagements. We need to scrutinize what affordances and semiotic resources culture could offer to nonhuman species and how culture could, by semiotic means, raise the integrity, stability, and resiliency of the ecosystem. The ecosemiosphere is a grounded semiosphere. (shrink)

Ricoeur, Culture, and Recognition: A Hermeneutic of Cultural Subjectivity presents Ricoeur’s work from the beginning to its end in form of a cultural theory and proposes a cultural hermeneutic that clarifies the cultural facilitation in a person’s process of attaining a sense of being a human. This exploration of human being as profoundly formed and influenced by the cultural condition also enables a new understanding of intercultural questions by revealing the common human condition that the various cultures manifest.

Die Wittgenstein-Rezeption hat sich in den letzten Jahrzehnten stark auf den Begriff der Regel konzentriert. Wittgenstein selbst betont allerdings immer wieder, dass eine Praxis nicht nur Regeln hat, sondern auch einen Witz, d.h. eine Pointe - er behauptet sogar: "Die Problematik der Philosophie ist die Problematik des Witzes". Demungeachtet gab es bisher keine systematische Studie, die der Bedeutung des Witzes in Wittgensteins Philosophie gerecht wurde. Durch die Berücksichtigung von Regel und Witz wirft die vorliegende Arbeit ein neues Licht auf Mathematik, (...) Sprache und Moral. (shrink)

Intonation plays an integral role in comprehending spoken language. Listeners can rapidly integrate intonational information to predictively map a given pitch accent onto the speaker's likely referential intentions. We use mouse tracking to investigate two questions: (a) how listeners draw predictive inferences based on information from intonation? and (b) how listeners adapt their online interpretation of intonational cues when these are reliable or unreliable? We formulate a novel Bayesian model of rational predictive cue integration and explore predictions derived under a (...) concrete linking hypothesis relating a quantitative notion of evidential strength of a cue to the moment in time, relative to the unfolding speech signal, at which mouse trajectories turn towards the eventually selected option. In order to capture rational belief updates after concrete observations of a speaker's behavior, we formulate and explore an extension of this model that includes the listener's hierarchical beliefs about the speaker's likely production behavior. Our results are compatible with the assumption that listeners rapidly and rationally integrate all available intonational information, that they expect reliable intonational information initially, and that they adapt these initial expectations gradually during exposition to unreliable input. All materials, data, and scripts can be retrieved here: https://osf.io/dnbuk/. (shrink)

Approaches to animal communication have for the most part been quite different in semiotics and evolutionary biology. In this context the writings of a leading evolutionary biologist who has also been attracted to semiotics — John Maynard Smith — are an interesting exception and object of study. The present article focuses on the use and adaptation of semiotic terminology in Maynard Smith’s works with reference to general theoretical premises both in semiotics and evolutionary biology. In developing a typology of animal (...) signals, Maynard Smith employs the concepts of icon, index and symbol to denote distinct signal classes.He uses “indices” or “indexes” to express a signal type where the relation between signal properties and meaning is restricted because of physical characteristics. Such approach also points out the issue of the motivatedness of signs, which has had a long history in semiotics. In the final part of the article the usage and content of the concepts of signal form and meaning in Maynard Smith’s writings are analysed. It appears that in evolutionary biology, the “signal” is a vague concept that may denote a variety of things from an animal’s specific physiological status to artificial theoretical constructs. It also becomes evident that in actual usage the concept of signal often includes references to the receiver’s activity and interpretation, which belong rather to the characteristics of sign process. The positive influence of Maynard Smith’s works on semiotics could lie in paying attention to the role of physical necessities in animal communication. Physicalconstraints and relations also seem to have a significant role in semiotic processes although this is not always sufficiently studied or understood in semiotics. (shrink)

Psychoanalytische Konzeptionen psychosomatischer Erkrankungen treffen sich mit Grundelementen psychoanalytischer Verstehens- und Bedeutungstheorie in der Kategorie der Negativität. Anschließend daran kann Freuds Bemerkung, das aktualneurotische (bzw. das somatisierte) Symptom trage »keinen Sinn, keine psychische Bedeutung«, anders gefolgt werden. Anhand einer Forschungs-Fallvignette einer teilstationären Behandlung wird aufgezeigt, inwiefern psychoanalytisch zu verstehen bedeutet, sich mit der nächsten, anderen Bedeutung auseinanderzusetzen. Ferner zeigen sich im Fall zwei Leitdimensionen zeitgenössischer psychoanalytischer Psychosomatik: die Psyche-Soma-Diskonnexion und die Selbst-Objekt-Organ-Verschmolzenheit. Dies wird zunächst im Hinblick auf psychoanalytische Krankheitslehre aufgearbeitet (...) und dann in Relation zu psychoanalytischer Hermeneutik als negative Hermeneutik gesetzt. Entscheidend ist die Annahme, dass der Anschluss an zeitgenössische philosophische Hermeneutiken für die Psychoanalyse insofern ertragreich ist, als eine Thematisierung der Negativität Bezugnahmen auf das dynamische Unbewusste erlaubt. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to elaborate ecosemiotics towards practical methodology of analysis. For that, the article first discusses the relation between meaning and context seen as a possibility for an ecological view immanent in semiotics. Then various perspectives in ecosemiotics are analyzed by describing biological and cultural ecosemiotics and critically reading the ecosemiotic works of W. Nöth and K. Kull. Emphasizes is laid on the need to integrate these approaches so that the resulting synthesis would both take into (...) account the semioticity of nature itself as well as allow analyzing the depiction of nature in the written texts. To this end, a model of nature-text is introduced. This relates two parties intertwined by meaningrelations — the written text and the natural environment. In support of theconcept of nature-text, the article discusses the Tartu–Moscow semioticians’ concepts of text, which are regarded as broad enough to accommodate the semiotic activity and environment creation of other animals besides humans. In the final section the concept of nature-text is used to describe nature writing as an appreciation of an alien semiotic sphere and to elucidate the nature writing’s marginality, explaining it with the need to interpret two different types of texts. (shrink)

In this paper I examine Axel Honneth’s normative reconstruction of the market as a sphere of social freedom in his 2014 book, Freedom’s Right. Honneth’s position is complex: on the one hand, he acknowledges that modern capitalist societies do not realise social freedom; on the other hand, he insists that the promise of social freedom is implicit in the market sphere. In fact, the latter explains why modern subjects have seen capitalism as legitimate. I will reconstruct Honneth’s conception of social (...) freedom and investigate how it is realised in the sphere in which Honneth sees it most successfully at work, the sphere of interpersonal relations. I then move on to the sphere of the market economy and discuss two related problems of this view that stem from his interpretation of Hegel. Next, I consider Honneth’s method of “normative reconstruction” and his reconstructions of the sphere of consumption and, finally, the labour market. My conclusion will be that market institutions cannot realise social freedom, and that this insight should orient the philosophical direction of critical social theory. (shrink)

In proof-theoretic semantics, meaning is based on inference. It may seen as the mathematical expression of the inferentialist interpretation of logic. Much recent work has focused on base-extension semantics, in which the validity of formulas is given by an inductive definition generated by provability in a ‘base’ of atomic rules. Base-extension semantics for classical and intuitionistic propositional logic have been explored by several authors. In this paper, we develop base-extension semantics for the classical propositional modal systems |$K$|⁠, |$KT$|⁠, |$K4$| and (...) |$S4$|⁠, with |$\square $| as the primary modal operator. We establish appropriate soundness and completeness theorems and establish the duality between |$\square $| and a natural presentation of |$\lozenge $|⁠. We also show that our semantics is in its current form not complete with respect to euclidean modal logics. Our formulation makes essential use of relational structures on bases. (shrink)

The role of uncertainty within an organization’s environment features prominently in the business ethics and management literature, but how corporate investment decisions should proceed in the face of uncertainties relating to the natural environment is less discussed. From the perspective of ecological economics, the salience of ecology-induced issues challenges management to address new types of uncertainties. These pertain to constraints within the natural environment as well as to institutional action aimed at conserving the natural environment. We derive six areas of (...) ecology-induced uncertainties and propose ecology-driven real options as a conceptual approach for systematically incorporating these uncertainties into strategic management. We combine our results in an integrative investment framework and illustrate its application with the case of carbon constraints. (shrink)

The same method that creates adversarial examples to fool image-classifiers can be used to generate counterfactual explanations that explain algorithmic decisions. This observation has led researchers to consider CEs as AEs by another name. We argue that the relationship to the true label and the tolerance with respect to proximity are two properties that formally distinguish CEs and AEs. Based on these arguments, we introduce CEs, AEs, and related concepts mathematically in a common framework. Furthermore, we show connections between current (...) methods for generating CEs and AEs, and estimate that the fields will merge more and more as the number of common use-cases grows. (shrink)

In the current debates about zoosemiotics its relations with the neighbouring disciplines are a relevant topic. The present article aims to analyse the complex relations between zoosemiotics and cognitive ethology with special attention to their establishers: Thomas A. Sebeok and Donald R. Griffin. It is argued that zoosemiotics and cognitive ethology have common roots in comparative studies of animal communication in the early 1960s. For supporting this claim Sebeok’s works are analysed, the classical and philosophical periods of his zoosemiotic views (...) are distinguished and the changing relations between zoosemiotics and cognitive ethology are described. The animal language controversy can be interpreted as the explicit point of divergence of the two paradigms, which, however, is a mere symptom of a deeper cleavage. The analysis brings out later critical differences between Sebeok’s and Griffin’s views on animal cognition and language. This disagreement has been the main reason for the critical reception and later neglect of Sebeok’s works in cognitive ethology. Sebeok’s position in this debate remains, however, paradigmatic, i.e. it proceeds from understanding of the contextualisation of semiotic processes that do not allow treating the animal mind as a distinct entity. As a peculiar parallel to Griffin’s metaphor of “animal mind”, Sebeok develops his understanding of “semiotic self” as a layered structure, characterised by an ability to make distinctions, foremost between itself and the surrounding environment. It appears that the history of zoosemiotics has two layers: in addition to the chronological history starting in 1963, when Sebeok proposed a name for the field, zoosemiotics is also philosophically rooted in Peircean semiotics and German biological philosophy. It is argued that the confrontation between zoosemiotics and cognitive ethology is related to different epistemological approaches and at least partly induced by underlying philosophical traditions. (shrink)

The year 2017 marks fifteen years for me as a fashion educator in Australia and the United States, nine of those in a full-time capacity. My research has focused on various facets of fashion and sustainability for almost as long. In that time many positive developments have occurred, among them, the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate action and the formation of the Sustainable Apparel Coalition in 2010, to name two. Yet an immense amount of urgent work remains. Wallace-Wells presents an (...) apocalyptic near-future caused by anthropogenic global warming;1 within two weeks the online version of the article became New York Magazine's most read in history. It is worth reading in tandem with Rockström et al.,2 as the latter... (shrink)

Sigmund Freuds »Jenseits des Lustprinzips« und die darin entwickelte Todestriebhypothese werden seit 100 Jahren kontrovers diskutiert, wobei die »zaudernde« Rezeption den im Text beschriebenen und vorgeführten »Zauderrhythmus« des Freud’schen Denkens abbildet. Die vorliegende Arbeit nimmt ausgehend von einer Skizze der Freud’schen Kernannahmen zum Todestrieb eine werkgeschichtliche Einordnung vor und stellt dann die Rezeptionsgeschichte einschließlich der Vorschläge zur Modifikationen in verschiedenen psychoanalytischen Denklinien vor (Klein-Bion, Lacan und andere französische Autoren, Bedeutung der Aggression). Neuere Ansätze werden unter dem Blickwinkel dialektischen Denkens und (...) des Einbezugs von Objektverlust betrachtet und Bezüge zur Sozialpsychologie und Kulturphilosophie dargestellt. Geendet wird in einer Diskussion der Konzeptualisierung »jenseits« des Lustprinzips, des Status des Todestriebs als Trieb sowie der Frage nach einem Triebmonismus. (shrink)

Felix Trautmann, Das Imaginäre in der Demokratie. Politische Befreiung und das Rätsel der freiwilligen Knechtschaft, Konstanz: Konstanz University Press 2020.

The concept of mimesis is not very often used in the contemporary semiotic dialogue. This article introduces several views on this concept, and on the basis of these, mimesis is comprehended as a phenomenon of communication. By highlighting different semantic dimensions of the concept, mimesis is seen as being composed of phases of communication and as such, it is connected with imitation, representation, iconicity and other semiotic concepts.