This article (in German) discusses the scope and content of John McDowell's famous claim that human perception is "conceptual all the way out". I motivate the claim by explaining its role within McDowell's transcendental concern to account for the mind's "openness to the world", i. e. the immediate presence or givenness (no capital "G") of objective reality in human perception. I argue that (a) dissolving this problem requires us to understand human perception as a rational power, that (b) a rational (...) power is a power whose actualizations involve the actualization of conceptual capacities, and that (c) the actualizations of powers that involve the actualizations of conceptual capacities have conceptual contents. I discuss the different versions of this claim to be found in McDowell's writings since "Mind and World". Furthermore, I distinguish between two ways of reading the claim which I call the "apperceptive" and the "phenomenal" reading respectively. The first reading, I argue, is the one McDowell actually endorses, whereas the second reading, which is not a part of his position, is the one foisted on him in many of the critical engagements with his work. (shrink)

Carl Vogt’s quarrel with Rudolph Wagner is considered to be a culmination of the materialism dispute in the 19th century. Out of this basically academic issue on the nature of human mental functions, a personal dispute quickly developed which was unrivalled in thematic incisiveness and expression. The aim of this study is the detailed linguistic analysis of the polemics and argumentation in this dispute based on extensive text excerpts, in which for the first time detailed linguistic studies on Vogt and (...) Wagner are presented. (shrink)

Because a title such as the one I have assigned to this contribution could either prompt all sorts of expectations or lead to forming no expectations at all, it seems important at the outset to begin by indicating what I shall not be concerned with. On the face of it the title could seem to call for a discussion of the way religious consciousness is expressed in the framework of this or that particular rational system or culture, presumably contemporary—be it (...) Hispanic, African, American Indian, Asiatic, European, or whatever. There can be no question that such a discussion would be significant, involving as it does the important contemporary concept of “acculturation,” which seeks to obviate the unfortunate identification of religion and any particular cultural or rational form of its expression. I shall not, in fact, be concerned with any particular culture or system at all, while, on the other hand, from the religious point of view I shall, like Hegel, be concerned only with Christianity, not as particular but as universal; not as a one among many but as all-embracing religious awareness. (shrink)

Ordinary language makes a distinction between knowing a person by having seen her before and knowing her “personally,” that is, by having interacted with her. The aim of my paper is to substantiate this distinction between knowledge by interaction and knowledge by acquaintance, that is, knowledge acquired by way of the senses. According to my view, knowledge of a person by interaction is the kind of knowledge sustained by addressing her as “you.” I claim that this second-person knowledge is essentially (...) of the same form as first-person knowledge, which is knowledge sustained by the capacity to use the first-person pronoun, “I.” Both are species of what I will call, in a Kantian manner of speaking, knowledge from spontaneity. In knowing each other as “you” and “I,” two persons united in a second-personal interaction are and spontaneously know each other as the joint subject of their act. Hence knowledge by interaction—the kind of knowledge which grounds the everyday conception of knowing someone “personally”—is necessarily shared. To say that A knows B in this manner implies—in fact, it is the same thing as saying—that B knows A, it is to say that A and B know each other. This is what constitutes knowledge by interaction as a sui generis kind of knowledge of persons. (shrink)

...If one takes a panoramic view of Hegel’s entire philosophical endeavor, the endeavor to come to grips with and to be committed to reality in the concrete, one is struck by one inescapable idea: the Hegelian enterprise is an extraordinarily unified and grandiose attempt to elaborate one concept, which Hegel sees as the root of all intelligibility, the concept of God, whatever that term is going to turn out to mean.......The question with which we are faced...is neither whether Hegel is (...) correct in what he says nor whether his interpreters are justified in what they say of him. Rather the question is one of finding out just what Hegel does say and of determining what impact that can have on our own thinking.......Why, then, the “Concept of God”? The answer is to be found in the culmination of the entire Hegelian system, “The Philosophy of Absolute Spirit.” Only in the light of “absolute Spirit” is anything Hegel says intelligible....in Hegel’s view, “absolute Spirit” is in fact to be identified with God and that, therefore, only if Hegel’s “Concept of God” is intelligible, will anything Hegel says be intelligible.—From the Introduction. (shrink)

Introduction -- Suspension -- Hegel and Schelling -- Outline of the whole -- The surge of reason : faculty epistemology in Kant and Fichte -- The first critique's basic distinction -- The third critique -- Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre -- Ascendant reason : the early Schelling -- Of the I -- The treatises -- Metastatic reason : Schelling's nature philosophy -- Organic reason : ideas for a philosophy of nature -- Rational nature : on the world-soul -- Inhibition of nature : the (...) Erster entwurf -- Synthetic reason : the system of transcendental idealism -- The idea of system -- The synthetic method -- History and art -- Reason as reflection and speculation : Hegel's collaboration with Schelling -- The differenzschrift -- Krug's pen -- The sacred abyss : Schelling's identity philosophy -- The darstellung -- System of philosophy in general -- Space, time, and suspension : Hegel's absolute knowing -- The phenomenology's critique of Schelling -- Absolute knowing -- Suspended reason : Hegel on the certainty and truth of reason -- Empty idealism -- Observing nature -- Observing self-consciousness -- Self-actualizing reason -- The project of individuality -- Reason on the periphery : Schelling's freedom essay -- Reason as peripheral -- Pantheism and freedom -- God as existing -- Longing for ground -- The possibility of evil -- The actuality of evil -- System, ground, and indifference -- Reason's systematic excess -- Hegel's system -- The myth of totalizing reason -- The philosophy of nature -- History -- Reason's systematic excess -- Schelling's positive philosophy -- The natural history of reason -- The critique of Hegel -- Now what? (shrink)

This essay explores why examples of mainstream philosophy of cognition and applied phenomenology demonstrate the implicit bias that they treat as their subject matter, whether the authors of these works intend or approve of their doing so. It is shown why egalitarian intuitions, which form the basis for ideal models of justice appealing to elites in racially stratified societies, provide an inadequate framework for illuminating and dismantling the mechanics of racial discrimination. Recently developed results in social choice theory are applied (...) here to cases where racial bias is perpetuated through institutionally orchestrated collective decision making. The “discursive dilemma” theorem suggests why the analysis of subliminal attitudes is irrelevant to correcting the racial injustices presumed to follow from implicit bias in societies where negative racial stereotypes, ostensibly and explicitly deplored, are covertly and illicitly reinforced. (shrink)

There is in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit a relatively brief passage at the beginning of Chapter IV, “Self-Consciousness,” which may well be one of the most difficult passages in the whole Hegelian corpus, but which is also of supreme importance for coming to grips with the movement of Hegel’s thought, not only in the Phenomenology but in the entire “system.” It is precisely the difficulty of the passage, it would seem, that explains why it has not been given by commentators (...) an attention proportionate to its significance. So much attention has been focused on the “independence of self-consciousness,” expressed in the sections on “Lordship and Bondage,” “Stoicism and Skepticism” and “The Unhappy Consciousness” — which are, it is true, important and which lend themselves most readily to extended interpretation — that not enough attention has been given to the introductory section, entitled “The Truth of the Certainty of Self,” in which are enunciated the principles which regulate the whole movement of Hegel’s thought. The section might be described as the indispensable transition from those forms of consciousness, which are merely “objective” yet try to give themselves off as authentic knowing, to what Hegel considers to be the only possible way of authenticating the objectivity of human consciousness, i.e., the self, which claims to know, progressively coming to know itself, a self-knowing which will be knowing at all only if it culminates in “absolute knowing.” Only in the light of this section will the preface be intelligible; only in its light will the whole of the Phenomenology hang together. (shrink)

It is commonplace to observe that explanations of human behavior diverge from explanations of other sorts, though it is far from commonplace to articulate exactly what this divergence amounts to. One very obvious and rather marvelous fact about explanations in the human sciences is that the subject matter talks and sometimes literally explains itself. This dissertation is an essay about what sort of difference language participation makes to explaining what language participants do. ;Currently, action theorists are recruiting insights from philosophy (...) of natural language to shed light on the relation between actions and the reason-giving statements that explain them. The four contemporary action theorists studied here maintain that certain types of thought do cause actions. And further, they maintain that from a true reason-giving statement one can infer the particular thoughts that caused an individual action. ;In Chapter I, I show how a standard model of explanation fails to reveal how reason-giving statements convey causal thoughts. In Chapter II, I try to pinpoint how a special mode of description reserved for action can be distinguished from other ways of describing occurrences. ;Different action theorists focus on different linguistic facts from which they draw their conclusions about the nature and structure of actions themselves. In Chapter III, I examine how the difference between claims of Donald Davidson and Alvin Goldman regarding individuation of actions may be traced back to their respective ways of construing the data of talk about actions. ;In Chapter IV, I examine Jennifer Hornsby's thesis that a special form of entailment follows exclusively from sentences about actions, based on their grammatical or 'surface' form. ;In Chapter V, I study the way Donald Davidson and John Searle apply 'holistic' theories of meaning to the problem of analyzing action explanations. ;Overall the results here go a modest way, only to demonstrate that we know less today than might be supposed about reasons and actions. (shrink)

In this article I examine “Ontology Matters!” (OM!) arguments. OM! arguments conclude that ontology can contribute to empirical success in social science. First, I capture the common form between different OM! arguments. Second, I describe quantifier variance as discussed in metaontology. Third, I apply quantifier variance to the common form of OM! arguments. I then present two ways in which ontology is prior to social science methodology, one realist and one pragmatic. I argue that a pragmatic interpretation of ontology’s priority (...) gives proponents of realist OM! arguments a special burden that they must meet to render their argument successful. (shrink)

Simmel begreift den Menschen als ,tauschendes Tier', der durch das Geld als universelles Äquivalent und nicht relativierbare Größe in ein Netz universeller Tauschbeziehungen eingesponnen ist. Seine systemische Analyse der Rolle des Geldes als unkontrollierbaren Fetisches ist für das Verständnis der mentalen Einstellungen der verantwortlichen Akteure in der gegenwärtigen Wirtschaftskrise durchaus aktuell, weil er nachweist, wie der Götze Geld in unsere intimsten, unbewussten Regungen vordringt und mittels seiner Indifferenz und seines Egoismus unser Bewusstsein in ein kalkulierendes, rechnendes und technokratisches eintrübt. Womit (...) nicht nur unsere Ratio, sondern auch unsere Sinnlichkeit, unser Selbstbezug und unser Bezug zu den Anderen präformiert wird. (shrink)

Despite all this, no one has, up to the present, devoted an entire book to the examination and analysis of his properly philosophical thinking and writing.This..

It is shown here that injustices due to racial discrimination are best identified in light of the deleterious effects they have upon their victims, rather than the beliefs and attitudes of their perpetrators. For among participants who cooperate clandestinely to bring about racial injustice there may be broad disagreement about what it is they are doing collectively, and why; or they may disagree in principle about whether what they are doing is morally right. I employ the notion of ‘nomotropic’ behaviour (...) to replace the oversimplified notion of ‘rule-following’ in order to explain how duplicity and hypocrisy fall shy of being regarded as irrational in social climates where implicit norms reinforce racial privileging while explicit norms denounce it. Further, examining the ‘collective utility’ of dogmatic beliefs and norms comprising part of the social architecture that covertly reinforces racial injustice may help to explain why it often seems to make so little diffe... (shrink)

Recent contributions to the philosophy of the social sciences have motivated ontological commitments using appeals to the social sciences (_naturalized_ social ontologies). These arguments rely on social scientific realism about the social sciences, the view that our social scientific theories are approximately true. I apply a distinction formulated in metaontology between ontologically loaded and unloaded meanings of existential quantification to argue that there is a pragmatic approach to naturalized social ontology that is minimally realist (it treats existence claims as true (...) or false) but that is ontologically austere. I argue that the extant arguments may be construed in terms of this pragmatic approach. The result is an approach to social ontology that is deflationist about naturalized social ontology. (shrink)

The European Legacy, Volume 17, Issue 4, Page 549-550, July 2012.

This article addresses Simon Lohse’s and Daniel Little’s responses to my article “Is Social Ontology Prior to Social Scientific Methodology?.” In that article, I present a pragmatic and deflationary view of the priority of social ontology to social science methodology where social ontology is valued for its ability to promote empirical success and not because it yields knowledge of what furnishes the social world. First, in response to Lohse, I argue that my view is compatible with a role for ontological (...) theorizing in the social sciences. However, the view that results instrumentalizes social ontology. Second, in my response to Little, I argue that the same considerations I made in my article apply to naturalistic attempts to motivate a non-deflationary view, repeating some of the central issues of that article. (shrink)

"This is a splendid, substantial volume." -Clio.

A clear summary of Husserl's often obscure and always complex writings. . . . very instructive.-Ethics.

This article is about conditionalized modal statements whose antecedents concern a preferential attitude of an agent. The focus is on anankastic conditionals or, as they are known in the philosophical literature, hypothetical imperatives. We present a linguistically-motivated analysis of anankastic and related conditionals and use it to address challenges for semantic theories of natural language conditionals motivated by certain philosophical concerns about practical reasoning and the requirements of rationality.

In a series of intriguing and far-reaching papers, Hannah Ginsborg introduced the notion of “primitive normativity” as the cornerstone of a novel account of the normativity of concepts, thought, and meaning. Her account is supposed to steer a middle course between what she regards as the two horns of a dilemma first laid out by Saul Kripke in his seminal reading of Wittgenstein’s discussion of rule-following. I propose to investigate Ginsborg’s conception. I begin by establishing the conceptual relations between the (...) notions of having concepts and of following rules, between concepts and normativity, in Section 7.1. I outline the Kripkean dilemma in Section 7.2 and derive from it, in Section 7.3, a criterion of adequacy for any philosophical account purporting to explain what it is to have concepts in terms of normativity. I go on to explain Ginsborg’s notion of primitive normativity and how it is supposed to meet the criterion of adequacy. In Sections 7.4 and 7.5, I introduce and evaluate two core claims of her position and argue that each of them leads her account to founder on its own criterion of adequacy. Thus I conclude that the notion of primitive normativity offers no viable escape from the Kripkean dilemma. (shrink)