Was ist Natur oder was könnte sie sein? Diese und weitere Fragen sind grundlegend für Naturdenken und -handeln. Das Lehr- und Studienbuch bietet eine historisch-systematische und zugleich praxisbezogene Einführung in die Naturphilosophie mit ihren wichtigsten Begriffen. Es nimmt den pluralen Charakter der Wahrnehmung von Natur in den philosophischen Blick und ist auch zum Selbststudium bestens geeignet.

This article elaborates on Wolfgang Schulze’s keynote speech of the same title at the 26th LIPP Symposium in Munich in 2019. It is based on the slides from his talk and various teaching materials, of which some figures have been translated from German to English before their inclusion in this article. While this article’s foundation rests on Schulze’s theories and research, we have done our best to build upon his work; direct quotes and key concepts of his will be cited (...) throughout the text. Schulze intended to write this article himself, but after his unexpected passing in early 2020, we decided to offer this contribution on his behalf.Research on taboo is widely spread across diverse academic disciplines that each attribute slightly, yet noticeably, different meanings to the concept. This article proposes an all-encompassing definition applicable to all socio-cultural contexts. To arrive at this comprehensive understanding, we first briefly survey the history oftabooand its linguistic study. Then, we present a formal and functional typology of circumnavigating taboos, taking into account the concepts ofmanaandnoaas proposed by Schulze (2019: 13, 15, 16). While the specific social restrictions resulting from tabooed relations vary from community to community, the purpose of taboo remains the same: social stability, protection and sustainability. Linguistic taboos contribute to these social functions by restricting the use of certain linguistic signs in certain situations. Such constraints necessitate strategies for avoiding taboo, including articulation shift, lexical substitution and the emergence of special languages, detailed here. (shrink)

Arthur Schopenhauer (born 1788 in Danzig, died 1860 in Frankfurt am Main), was the son of Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer, a wealthy merchant, and Johanna Trosiener, who was later to become a well‐known member of Goethe's circle in Weimar and, subsequently, a popular novelist whose collected works, published in 1831, filled twenty‐four volumes. The death of his father (a probable suicide) in 1805 led to the future philosopher's ultimate abandonment of the plan that he should enter business. After further study, (...) he attended the University of Göttingen in 1809 where he studied with G. E. Schulze, whose Aenisidisumus (1796), with its critique of Kant's conception of the thing‐in‐itself, had played a crucial role in the early development of Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre. It was through Schulze that he became acquainted, not only with Kant, but with Plato and Schelling (see Hübscher 1989, pp. 159ff). The connection between Plato and Kant, a crucial thesis of his philosophy as a whole, is the subject of some of his earliest and most penetrating notebook entries (Schopenhauer 1988, vol. I, nos 17, 228, 442). Schopenhauer left Göttingen for Berlin to attend Fichte's lectures. Despite apparently serious attempts, testified by his voluminous notebooks (preserved in Schopenhauer 1988, vol. II), Schopenhauer found himself deeply out of sympathy with the Fichtean philosophy of reflection, and his distaste for German idealism, which only increased with the years, dates from this encounter. On the heels of Napoleon's invasion of Berlin, Schopenhauer retired to a small town outside of Weimar, where (June‐November 1813) he wrote his dissertation On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, whose simplification and transformation of the Kantian doctrine of the concepts of the understanding into a third “form of intuition” next to space and time forms the basis of his distinctive epistemology and its difference from Kant's. (This difference is most clearly expressed in §21; see also the “Critique of Kantian Philosophy”, the Appendix to The World as Will and Representation, vol. I, pp. 437–451). The “ideality of sensation” is the theme of On Vision and Colors, written in 1815 under the influence of his encounter with Goethe's Farbenlehre (a sympathy not reciprocated by Goethe for the younger man's contribution). At this time, Schopenhauer moved to Dresden, where for four years he worked out The World as Will and Representation in intellectual isolation. In addition to the dual influence of Plato and Kant, Schopenhauer had also been introduced to doctrines of Eastern religion by F. Meyer in Weimar (1813), and is often said to be the first Western philosopher seriously to incorporate Eastern thought into his system (see Schopenhauer 1988, vol. I, no. 564). The “work” is announced in a note that is even earlier, from 1813, which begins. (shrink)

In terms of Groenendijk and Stokhof’s (1984) formalization of exhaustive interpretation, many conversational implicatures can be accounted for. In this paper we justify and generalize this approach. Our justification proceeds by relating their account via Halpern and Moses’ (1984) non-monotonic theory of ‘only knowing’ to the Gricean maxims of Quality and the first sub-maxim of Quantity. The approach of Groenendijk and Stokhof (1984) is generalized such that it can also account for implicatures that are triggered in subclauses not entailed by (...) the whole complex sentence. (shrink)

This paper argues that the exclusion problem for mental causation can be solved by a variant of non-reductive physicalism that takes the mental not merely to supervene on, but to be grounded in, the physical. A grounding relation between events can be used to establish a principle that links the causal relations of grounded events to those of grounding events. Given this principle, mental events and their physical grounds either do not count as overdetermining physical effects, or they do so (...) in a way that is not objectionable. (shrink)

The appropriateness, or acceptability, of a conditional does not just ‘go with’ the corresponding conditional probability. A condition of dependence is required as well. In this paper a particular notion of dependence is proposed. It is shown that under both a forward causal and a backward evidential reading of the conditional, this appropriateness condition reduces to conditional probability under some natural circumstances. Because this is in particular the case for the so-called diagnostic reading of the conditional, this analysis might help (...) to explain some of Douven and Verbrugge’s empirical observations. (shrink)

In this paper an approach to the exhaustive interpretation of answers is developed. It builds on a proposal brought forward by Groenendijk and Stokhof (1984). We will use the close connection between their approach and McCarthy’s (1980, 1986) predicate circumscription and describe exhaustive interpretation as an instance of interpretation in minimal models, well-known from work on counterfactuals (see for instance Lewis (1973)). It is shown that by combining this approach with independent developments in semantics/pragmatics one can overcome certain limitations of (...) Groenenedijk and Stokhof’s (1984) proposal. In the last part of the paper we will provide a Gricean motivation for exhaustive interpretation building on work of Schulz (to appear) and van Rooij and Schulz (2004). (shrink)

In terms of Groenendijk and Stokhofs (1984) formalization of exhaustive interpretation, many conversational implicatures can be accounted for. In this paper we justify and generalize this approach. Our justification proceeds by relating their account via Halpern and Moses (1984) non-monotonic theory of only knowing to the Gricean maxims of Quality and the first sub-maxim of Quantity. The approach of Groenendijk and Stokhof (1984) is generalized such that it can also account for implicatures that are triggered in subclauses not entailed by (...) the whole complex sentence. (shrink)

Many generic sentences express stable inductive generalizations. Stable inductive generalizations are typically true for a causal reason. In this paper we investigate to what extent this is also the case for the generalizations expressed by generic sentences. More in particular, we discuss the possibility that many generic sentences of the form ‘ks have feature e’ are true because kind k have the causal power to ‘produce’ feature e. We will argue that such an analysis is quite close to a probabilistic (...) based analysis of generic sentences according to which ‘relatively many’ ks have feature e, and that, in fact, this latter type of analysis can be ‘grounded’ in terms of causal powers. We will argue, moreover, that the causal power analysis is sometimes preferred to a correlation-based analysis, because it takes the causal structure that gives rise to the probabilistic data into account. (shrink)

Three facts are widely thought to be key to the characterization of human cognitive uniqueness (though a number of other factors are often cited as well): (a) humans are sophisticated cultural learners; (b) humans often rely on mental states with rich representational contents; and (c) humans have the ability and disposition to make and use tools. This article argues that (a)–(c) create a positive feedback loop: Sophisticated cultural learning makes possible the manufacture of tools that increase the sophistication of representational (...) decision-making, which in turn allows for yet further increases in the sophistication of cultural learning and tool manufacture. (shrink)

In this paper, we explain why the antecedent of a biscuit conditional is relevant to its consequent by extending Douvenʼs evidential support theory of conditionals making use of utilities. By this extension, we can also explain why a biscuit conditional gives rise to the inference that the consequence is (most likely) true. Finally, we account for the intuition that (indicative) biscuit sentences are false when the antecedent is false and allow for counterfactual biscuits.

In their book Unto Others, Sober and Wilson argue that various evolutionary considerations (based on the logic of natural selection) lend support to the truth of psychological altruism. However, recently, Stephen Stich has raised a number of challenges to their reasoning: in particular, he claims that three out of the four evolutionary arguments they give are internally unconvincing, and that the one that is initially plausible fails to take into account recent findings from cognitive science and thus leaves open a (...) number of egoistic responses. These challenges make it necessary to reassess the plausibility of Sober & Wilson’s evolutionary account—which is what I aim to do in this paper. In particular, I try to show that, as a matter of fact, Sober & Wilson’s case remains compelling, as some of Stich’s concerns rest on a confusion, and those that do not are not sufficiently strong to establish all the conclusions he is after. The upshot is that no reason has been given to abandon the view that evolutionary theory has advanced the debate surrounding psychological altruism. (shrink)

General practice consultation has often been characterized by pragma-dialecticians as an argumentative activity type. These characterizations are typically derived from theoretical insights and qualitative analyses. Yet, descriptions that are based on quantitative data are thus far lacking. This paper provides a detailed account of the development of an instrument to guide the quantitative analysis of argumentation in doctor–patient consultation. It describes the implementation and preliminary results of a content analysis of seventy videotaped medical consultations of which the extent and type (...) of doctors’ argumentative support for medical opinions and advice are analyzed. Based on the study results, this paper addresses the merits of observational studies using content analysis as a method for the analysis of argumentative discourse in context as well as some of its key challenges and limitations, laying bare the opportunities for future research. (shrink)

Indexical beliefs pose a special problem for standard theories of Bayesian updating. Sometimes we are uncertain about our location in time and space. How are we to update our beliefs in situations like these? In a stepwise fashion, I develop a constraint on the dynamics of indexical belief. As an application, the suggested constraint is brought to bear on the Sleeping Beauty problem.

Finding out why we have beliefs and desires is important for a thorough understanding of the nature of our minds (and those of other animals). It is therefore unsurprising that several accounts have been presented that are meant to answer this question. At least in the philosophical literature, the most widely accepted of these are due to Kim Sterelny and Peter Godfrey-Smith, who argue that beliefs and desires evolved due to their enabling us to be behaviourally flexible in a way (...) that reflexes do not—which, they claim, is beneficial in epistemically complex environments. However, as I try to make clear in this paper, upon closer consideration, this kind of account turns out to be theoretically implausible. In the main, this is because it fails to give due credit to the powers of reflex-driven organisms, which can in fact be just as flexible in their behaviour as ones that are belief/desire-driven. In order to improve on this account, I therefore propose that beliefs and desires evolved, not due to their enabling us to do something completely different from what reflexive organisms can do, but rather due to their enabling us to do the same things better. Specifically, I argue that beliefs and desires evolved for making the generation of behaviour more efficient, since they can simplify the necessary cognitive labour considerably. I end by considering various implications of this account. (shrink)

Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Vernunft und Freiheit -- Sören Kierkegaard, Existenz und System.

Objects have dispositions. Dispositions are normally analyzed by providing a meaning to disposition ascriptions like ‘This piece of salt is soluble’. Philosophers like Carnap, Goodman, Quine, Lewis and many others have proposed analyses of such disposition ascriptions. In this paper we will argue with Quine that the proper analysis of ascriptions of the form ‘x is disposed to m ’, where ‘x’ denotes an object, ‘m’ a manifestation, and ‘C’ a condition, goes like this: ‘x is of natural kind k’, (...) and the generic ‘ks are m ’ is true. For the analysis of the generic, we propose an analysis in terms of causal powers: ‘ks have the causal power to m’. The latter, in turn, is analyzed in a very precise way, making use of Pearl’s probabilistic graphical causal models. We will show how this natural kind-analysis improves on standard conditional analyses of dispositions by avoiding the standard counterexamples, and that it gives rise to precise observable criteria under which the disposition ascription is true. (shrink)

The essays in this volume commemorate the 70th anniversary of Jacques Maritain's Pour la Justice, in which the French Thomist and future drafter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights grappled with the moral, political, and religious challenges facing Europe in the aftermath of World War II. During this time Maritain reflected on humanism, Christian philosophy, the relation between freedom, religion and politics, and increasingly, on education. Several scholars reflect on the historical impact of Maritain's own writings during World War (...) II, Vatican II, and the Spanish Civil war. In other sections, contemporary Thomists suggest ways a resurgent Thomism can engage with the pressing issues of our own day. Essays on Thomistic ethics address problems in bioethics, the philosophy of love, and the foundations of Natural Law, while others tackle perennial problems in metaphysics and epistemology, such as the problem of free will, subjectivity, and the role of creative intuition in aesthetics. Still other essays apply Maritain's work on education to current challenges facing religious universities today. The contributors to this volume include: Noel Adams, Florian Michel, Sr. Anne Frances Ai Le, Brian Kemple, Stephen Chamberlain, Walter Schulz, Francisco Eduardo Plaza, James Jacobs, John Dunaway, Greg Kerr, Megan Furman, Karen Chan, Justin Gable, Federico Tedesco, Michael Torre, Richard Schenk, OP, and Gregory Reichberg. (shrink)

Der Niedergang des Bürgertums seit dem ausgehenden 19. Jahrhundert ist vielfach beschrieben worden - literarisch ebenso wie wissenschaftlich. Andreas Schulz wählt hingegen einen ganz anderen Ansatzpunkt: Bürgerlichkeit wird in seinem Studienbuch (auch) als krisenfestes Leitbild sichtbar, das bis in heutige, postmoderne Zeiten als Identifikationsmöglichkeit Bestand hat und jenen, die sich dem Bürgertum zugehörig fühlen, Rückhalt bietet. Der Forschungsteil macht die großen Kontroversen der letzten Jahrzehnte anschaulich. Die reihentypische, thematisch gegliederte Bibliographie ist das ideale Hilfsmittel für das Studium und eigene (...) Forschungen. (shrink)

I develop a distinction between two types of psychological hedonism. Inferential hedonism (or “I-hedonism”) holds that each person only has ultimate desires regarding his or her own hedonic states (pleasure and pain). Reinforcement hedonism (or “R–hedonism”) holds that each person's ultimate desires, whatever their contents are, are differentially reinforced in that person’s cognitive system only by virtue of their association with hedonic states. I’ll argue that accepting R-hedonism and rejecting I-hedonism provides a conciliatory position on the traditional altruism debate, and (...) that it coheres well with the neuroscientist Anthony Dickinson’s theory about the evolutionary function of hedonic states, the “hedonic interface theory.” Finally, I’ll defend R-hedonism from potential objections. (shrink)