The paper critically examines an objection to epistemic contextualism recently developed by Elke Brendel and Peter Baumann, according to which it is impossible for the contextualist to know consistently that his theory is true. I first present an outline of contextualism and its reaction to scepticism. Then the necessary and sufficient conditions for the knowability problem to arise are explored. Finally, it will be argued that contextualism does not fulfil these minimal conditions. It will be shown that the contrary (...) view is based on a misunderstanding of what contextualists are claiming. (shrink)

Wie sieht die korrekte Struktur der Rechtfertigung menschlichen Wissens aus? Welches sind ihre legitimen Quellen? Wie groß ist der Umfang unserer gerechtfertigten Meinungen? Von der normativen Erkenntnistheorie erhoffen wir uns Antworten auf diese und ähnliche Fragen. Allzu oft wird dabei übersehen, daß die Antworten ganz entscheidend davon abhängen, was wir unter 'Rechtfertigung' verstehen. Mit den Beiträgen einer internationalen Autorenschaft möchte das Buch durch die Konfrontation der traditionellen Erkenntnistheorie mit ihren Gegnern die versteckten Prämissen und Implikationen der traditionellen Perspektive transparenter machen. (...) Mit Beiträgen von: Thomas Bartelborth, Peter Baumann, Sven Bernecker, Elke Brendel, Fred Dretske, Thomas Grundmann, Frank Hofmann, Dirk Koppelberg, Hilary Kornblith, Wolfgang Spohn, Catrin Misselhorn, Richard Schantz, Christiane Schildknecht, Oliver Scholz, Karsten Stüber, Marcus Willaschek, Michael Williams. (shrink)

This book analyses an inconsistency within epistemic contextualism known as the factivity problem. It also provides key insights into epistemic contextualism, an important innovation in contemporary epistemology, enabling readers to gain a better understanding of the various solutions to the factivity problem. As the authors demonstrate, each explanation is based on a different interpretation of the problem. Divided into seven chapters, the book offers comprehensive coverage of this topic, which will be of major interest to philosophers engaged in epistemology and (...) the philosophy of language. After an introductory chapter, Chapter 2 presents the most common understanding of epistemic contextualism and its semantic basis. It also clarifies the epistemological implications of the theory’s semantic assumptions. This chapter also explains the main argument of the factivity problem. The next four chapters discuss the respective solutions proposed by Wolfgang Freitag, Alexander Dinges, Anthony Brueckner and Christopher Buford, Michael Ashfield, Martin Montminy and Wes Skolits, and Peter Baumann. Stefano Leardi and Nicla Vassallo highlight the similarities and commonalities, identifying three main approaches to the factivity problem. Chapter 7 provides a brief overview of the solutions proposed to solve the factivity problem and presents an outline of the conclusions reached in the book. (shrink)

Concentrating on Weber's engagement with political issues and their influence over his more theoretical concepts, Mommsen offers a critical analysis of Weber's notion of democracy, distinguishing its liberal and elitist features.

This ground-breaking book brings together researchers from a wide range of disciplines to discuss the control and coordination of processes involved in perceptually guided actions. The research area of motor control has become an increasingly multidisciplinary undertaking. Understanding the acquisition and performance of voluntary movements in biological and artificial systems requires the integration of knowledge from a variety of disciplines from neurophysiology to biomechanics.

This Element addresses three questions about Kant's guarantee thesis by examining the 'first addendum' of his Philosophical Sketch: how the guarantor powers interrelate, how there can be a guarantee without undermining freedom and why there is a guarantee in the first place. Kant's conception of an interplay of human and divine rational agency encompassing nature is crucial: on moral grounds, we are warranted to believe the 'world author' knew that if he were to bring about the world, the 'supreme' good (...) would come about too. Perpetual peace is the condition that enables the supreme good to be realized in history. (shrink)

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, countries around the world developed ICU triaging guidelines. One important point of convergence was an explicit commitment to...

In many of his logical writings, G. W. Leibniz makes use of two kinds of symbols : while A, B, C, . . . stand for certain determinate or definite concepts, X, Y, Z, . . . are referred to as "indefinite concepts". We investigate the various rôles played by these variables and show i) that their most important function consists in serving as quantifiers ; ii) that Leibniz's elliptic representation of the quantifiers by means of two sorts of „indefinite (...) concepts” leads to certain difficulties; iii) that despite these problems Leibniz anticipated the most fundamental logical principles for the quantifiers and may thus be viewed as a forerunner of modern predicate logic. (shrink)

Die Welt ist alles, was wir in unseren naturwissenschaftlichen Theorien beschreiben können – so eine weit verbreitete Überzeugung, die seit den Tagen des Positivismus unser Weltbild bestimmt. Aber reicht das tatsächlich schon aus? Wer sich am Ideal der wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnis orientiert, neigt dazu, viele nicht-begriffliche Erfahrungsformen zu unterschlagen, die uns aus dem Alltag vertraut sind: Symbolsysteme wie Musik, Literatur oder Bilder, Instanzen der unmittelbaren Erfahrung wie Anschauung, Wahrnehmung oder Gefühl und den Bereich des praktischen Könnens. In der Regel sind wir (...) nicht in der Lage, den Gehalt dieser Phänomene vollständig begrifflich wiederzugeben. Dennoch ist das weite Feld des Nichtbegrifflichen eine unverzichtbare Voraussetzung unserer Sätze und Gedanken: Ohne Kunst, Wahrnehmung und Handeln gibt es kein Denken, keine Wissenschaft, keine Philosophie. Der Band geht der Vielfalt des Nicht-Begrifflichen in ästhetischen, symboltheoretischen und semantischen Untersuchungen nach. Aus ihnen ergibt sich ein umfassender systematischer Überblick über eines der spannendsten und offensten Problemfelder der aktuellen philosophischen Debatte. Mit Beiträgen von: Andreas Bartels, Uwe Baumann, Volker Beeh, Gottfried Boehm, Olaf Breidbach, Joachim Bromand, Gottfried Gabriel, Markus Gabriel, Ernest Wolf Gazo, Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert, Jürgen Goldstein, Jens Halfwassen, Thomas Sören Hoffmann, Wolfgang Harms, Jochen Hörisch, Peter Janich, Guilherme F. R. Kisteumacher, Jakub Kloc-Konkolowicz, Imi Knoebel, Theo Kobusch, Klaus-M. Kodalle, Sibylle Krämer, Guido Kreis, Wolfgang Kubin, Sönke Lorenz, Antonio Cota Marçal, Aliasghar Mosleh, Theodoros Penolidis, Dominik Perler, Hans-Joachim Pieper, Andrzej Przylebski, Birgit Sandkaulen, Matthias Schmoeckel, Oswald Schwemmer, Josef Simon, Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer, Dieter Teichert, Kai Vogeley, Gottfried Willems und Gereon Wolters. (shrink)

Traditional logic as a part of philosophy is one of the oldest scientific disciplines. Mathematical logic, however, is a relatively young discipline and arose from the endeavors of Peano, Frege, Russell and others to create a logistic foundation for mathematics. It steadily developed during the 20th century into a broad discipline with several sub-areas and numerous applications in mathematics, informatics, linguistics and philosophy. While there are already several well-known textbooks on mathematical logic, this book is unique in that it is (...) much more concise than most others, and the material is treated in a streamlined fashion which allows the professor to cover many important topics in a one semester course. Although the book is intended for use as a graduate text, the first three chapters could be understood by undergraduates interested in mathematical logic. These initial chapters cover just the material for an introductory course on mathematical logic combined with the necessary material from set theory. This material is of a descriptive nature, providing a view towards decision problems, automated theorem proving, non-standard models and other subjects. The remaining chapters contain material on logic programming for computer scientists, model theory, recursion theory, Godel’s Incompleteness Theorems, and applications of mathematical logic. Philosophical and foundational problems of mathematics are discussed throughout the text. The author has provided exercises for each chapter, as well as hints to selected exercises. About the German edition: …The book can be useful to the student and lecturer who prepares a mathematical logic course at the university. What a pity that the book is not written in a universal scientific language which mankind has not yet created. - A.Nabebin, Zentralblatt. (shrink)

And this paper is an attempt to say precisely how, thus addressing a philosophical problem which is commonly taken to be a serious one. It does so, however, in quite an idiosyncratic way. It is based on the account of inductive schemes I have given in (1988) and (1990a) and on the conception of causation I have presented in (1980), (1983), and (1990b), and it intends to fill one of many gaps which have been left by these papers. Still, I (...) have tried to make this paper self-contained. Section 1 explains the philosophical question this paper is about; in more general terms it asks what might be meant by objectifying epistemic states or features of them and to which extent epistemic states can be objectified. The next sections introduce the basis I rely on with formal precision and some explanation; section 2 deals with induction and section 3 with causation. Within these confines, section 4 attempts to give an explication of the relevant sense of objectification and section 5 investigates the extent to which various features of epistemic states are objectifiable. The two most salient results are roughly that the relation "A is a reason for B" cannot be objectified at all and that the relation "A is a cause of B" can be objectified only under substantial, though reasonable restrictions. What has all of this to do with probability? A lot. The paper trades on a pervasive duality between probabilistic and deterministic epistemology, between a probabilistic representation of epistemic states together with a theory of probabilistic causation and another representation of epistemic states which I call deterministic because it lends itself, in a perfectly parallel fashion, to a theory of deterministic causation. Here I explicitly deal only with the deterministic side, but the duality should pave the way for further conclusions concerning objective probabilities and statistical laws. This outlook is briefly expanded in the final section 6. (shrink)

Diese Arbeit stellt Freges Denken in seiner Entwicklung von den Anfängen bis zum Auftreten des Widerspruch dar. Ausführlich behandelt sind die Begriffsschrift, die Erläuterungsschriften dazu, die Grundlagen der Arithmetik sowie die Texte im Übergang zu den Grundgesetzen der Arithmetik, ein- schließlich der klassischen Aufsätze Funktion und Begriff, Über Sinn und Bedeutung und Über Begriff und Gegenstand. Die Texte werden nach Chronologie und Stellung zueinander präzise aufgeschlüsselt; auch die zeitgenössischen Rezensionen und Freges wissenschaftliches Umfeld werden berücksichtigt. Freges Werk wird dadurch in (...) seiner beeindruckenden Zielstrebigkeit, Geschlossenheit und Tiefe sichtbar. Sein Zentrum ist die radikale Neufassung der Logik, ausgehend von der Grundunterscheidung von Begriff und Gegenstand, die zunächst eher unauffällig über die Zerfällung des Urteils in Funktion und Argument eingeführt und mit f(a) notiert wird. Zusammen mit der Einführung einer (Quantoren-)Notation, um die Allgemeinheit der Einsetzungen auf beiden Positionen einzuschränken, übertrifft Freges Logik die traditionelle, alle zeitgenössischen und etliche spätere an Präzision und Ausdruckskraft. Eben die grundsätzliche Trennung von Begriff und Gegenstand erweist sich aber für sein wissenschaftliches Hauptanliegen, die Ableitung der Arithmetik aus der Logik, als schwerwiegendes, letztlich nicht zu überwindendes Hindernis. Es gelingt ihm nicht, die Zahlen als „logische Gegenstände“ überzeugend einzuführen, und so zeigt er wider Willen die wesentliche Verschiedenheit von Logik und Arithmetik auf. (shrink)

In the last decade, we have observed a continuous increase of interest in eye movement research. According to a recent investigation, eye movements are discussed in over one million publications. The number of publications with eye movement in the title or abstract has been steadily increasing over the years, with over 1,200 papers published alone in 2013. The last decade has also witnessed the emergence of many new sub-disciplines in the field of neuroscience and cognition - one of them is (...) neuroaesthetics, which refers to the [neuro-]science of aesthetic perception of art.The title and contents of our book have been inspired by a very influential research article. It is one of the most cited scientific papers of all time, published in 1959 by a team of neurophysiologists and engineers, Lettvin, McCulloch and Pitts who are considered to be the founders of modern cybernetics. Their article, "What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain," refers to the role of internal cortical models in the communication or interfacing of the information in the outside world with the practical contextual task of the viewer. It shows how eye movements are the modality of this communication. The same duality between eye movements and internal models plays a fundamental role in humans. When we look, for example, at art, it explains those neurological processes involved in neuroaesthetics. Our book undertakes this innovative approach to neuroaesthetics. It explains this duality and discusses the communication between the artist and the viewer's aesthetic perception. It is structured into five chapters.Chapter One discusses the neurology of aesthetics, the idea of art as a form of communication, and explains perception as an active matching between a "top" (the viewer's mind) and a "down" (the viewer's sensorial machinery). It goes deep into the philosophical quandary of what beauty is in terms of art. Chapter Two is about eye movements and the scanpath theory of vision perception. It discusses the role of visual attention for controlling active vision, the meaning of mental binding and the analysis of eye movements as the key to understanding aesthetic processes. Chapter Three introduces Claude Shannon's information theory using it as a matrix into which to embed the top down active vision scanpath theory. The authors explain the main concept of neuroaesthetics as a form of communication mediated by the sequence of eye fixations. Chapter Four discusses art critique: The role of the viewer's training and expectation, the dilemma of the aesthetics of art versus non-art and how all of this affects the viewing mode. Finally, Chapter Five treats the intimacy of the artistic process, showing the unique implementation of the communicative experience between the artist and the viewer - the relation between a pictorial representation defined by the artist and modes of AWE generated in the viewer during active looking. (shrink)

Comparing action-at-a-distance electrodynamics in the tradition of Coulomb and Ampère with electromagnetic field theory of Faraday and Maxwell provides an example for a relation between theories, that are on a par in many respects. They have a broadly overlapping domain of applicability, and both were widely successful in explanation and prediction. The relation can be understood as an inhomogeneous reduction without a clear distinction between reducing and reduced theory. It is argued in general, when a clear hierarchy between competing theories (...) cannot be determined, the plurality of standpoints should be preserved and the bridge laws carefully developed. (shrink)

Originally published as 'Das Problem des Prinzipienforschung und die aristotelische Physik' in Kant-Studien 52 (1960-1), pp. 206-19, the revised text of a lecture given on 28 October 1959 in Hamburg. It presents in summary form the main line of argument developed in the introduction and first two parts of Wieland's book, Die aristotelische Physik (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1962).