I address a criticism of the use of thought experiments in conceptual analysis advanced on the basis of the survey method of so-called experimental philosophy. The criticism holds that surveys show that intuitions are relative to cultures in a way that undermines the claim that intuition-based investigation yields any objective answer to philosophical questions. The crucial question is what intuitions are as philosophers have been interested in them. To answer this question we look at the role of intuitions in philosophical (...) inquiry. When we have done this, we can see that it is impossible for intuitions properly understood to be relative in the way that has been suggested as they are conceived of as expressions of competence in the concepts deployed in their contents. The remaining methodological issues, though not to be dismissed, present no in principle objection to the method of thought experiments. (shrink)

Current controversies about knowledge integration reflect conflicting ideas of what it means to “take Indigenous knowledge seriously”. While there is increased interest in integrating Indigenous and Western scientific knowledge in various disciplines such as anthropology and ethnobiology, integration projects are often accused of recognizing Indigenous knowledge only insofar as it is useful for Western scientists. The aim of this article is to use tools from philosophy of science to develop a model of both successful integration and integration failures. On the (...) one hand, I argue that cross-cultural recognition of property clusters leads to an ontological overlap that makes knowledge integration often epistemically productive and socially useful. On the other hand, I argue that knowledge integration is limited by ontological divergence. Adequate models of Indigenous knowledge will therefore have to take integration failures seriously and I argue that integration efforts need to be complemented by a political notion of ontological self-determination. (shrink)

This book comprises material on colour which was written by Wittgenstein in the last eighteen months of his life. It is one of the few documents which shows him concentratedly at work on a single philosophical issue. The principal theme is the features of different colours, of different kinds of colour (metallic colour, the colours of flames, etc.) and of luminosity—a theme which Wittgenstein treats in such a way as to destroy the traditional idea that colour is a simple and (...) logically uniform kind of thing. This edition consists of Wittgenstein's basic German text, together with an English translation. (shrink)

Kirk Ludwig presents a philosophical account of institutional action, such as action by corporations and nation states. He argues that it can be fully understood in terms of the agency of individuals, and concepts derived from our understanding of individual action. He thus argues for a strong form of methodological individualism.

This article develops an account of local epistemic practices on the basis of case studies from ethnobiology. I argue that current debates about objectivity often stand in the way of a more adequate understanding of local knowledge and ethnobiological practices in general. While local knowledge about the biological world often meets criteria for objectivity in philosophy of science, general debates about the objectivity of local knowledge can also obscure their unique epistemic features. In modification of Ian Hacking’s suggestion to discuss (...) “ground level questions” instead of objectivity, I propose an account that focuses on both epistemic virtues and vices of local epistemic practices. (shrink)

Wittgenstein's _Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus_, first published in 1921, has had a profound influence on modern philosophic thought. _Prototractatus_ is a facsimile reproduction of an early version of _Tractatus_, only discovered in 1965. The original text has a parallel English translation and the text is edited to indicate all relevant deviations from the final version.

Elimination controversies are ubiquitous in philosophy and the human sciences. For example, it has been suggested that human races, hysteria, intelligence, mental disorder, propositional attitudes such as beliefs and desires, the self, and the super-ego should be eliminated from the list of respectable entities in the human sciences. I argue that eliminativist proposals are often presented in the framework of an oversimplified “phlogiston model” and suggest an alternative account that describes ontological elimination on a gradual scale between criticism of empirical (...) assumptions and conceptual choices. (shrink)

Originally published in 1967. Ludwig Edelstein characterizes the idea of "progress" in Greek and Roman times. He analyzes the ancients' belief in "a tendency inherent in nature or in man to pass through a regular sequence of stages of development in past, present, and future, the latter stages being—with perhaps occasional retardations or minor regressions—superior to the earlier." Edelstein's contemporaries asserted that the Greeks and Romans were entirely ignorant of a belief in progress in this sense of the term. (...) In arguing against this dominant thesis, Edelstein draws from the conclusions of scholars of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and discusses ideas of Auguste Comte and Wilhelm Dilthey. (shrink)

We propose a philosophical theory of scientific models. Our main claim is that they should be understood as fictions. We illustrate the relevance of the claim by illustrations drawn from the history of science, and we propose a typology.

Appeal to triangulation occurs in two different contexts in Davidson’s work. In the first, triangulation—in the trigonometric sense—is used as an analogy to help explain the central idea of a transcendental argument designed to show that we can have the concept of objective truth only in the context of communication with another speaker. In the second, the triangulation of two speakers responding to each other and to a common cause of similar responses is invoked as a solution to the problem (...) of underdetermination of thought and meaning by the patterns of causal relations we stand in to the environment. I examine both of these uses of the idea of triangulation. In section 2, I take up the use of triangulation as an analogy in connection with Davidson transcendental argument to establish that communication is essential for the concept of objectivity. I argue that it is unsuccessful because the case has not been made that scope for deploying the idea of contrasting perspectives, which is needed for the concept of objectivity, is available only in the context of communication. In section 3, I take up the idea that triangulation on a common cause of common responses of two creatures interacting with each other provides the additional constraint needed to assign objective content to our thoughts and words. I show that appeal to this sort of triangulation provides minimal help in responding to the problem it is intended to solve. Section 4 provides a brief summary and conclusion. (shrink)

This study examines the topical frames reflected in articles published about Syrian refugees by German, British and American news websites in 2016. We analyze these for terms associated with Syrian refugees and the themes they address then relate them to those we identified for 2015 and to those indicated by German students in expressing their attitudes towards them. The results show that, despite discrepancies in the occurrence of Syrian refugees’ collocates in our 2016 news corpora, they still reflect, at a (...) lower rate, the themes identified for 2015: humanitarianism, conflict, dehumanization, security, economic burden, political responsibility, and integration. The survey results confirm humanitarianism and integration as particularly prominent themes for our participants, too. While our findings provide further discursive evidence for the variation in refugees’ representations in news discourse and for the influence of media on public opinion, they suggest that this impact may be balanced out by other factors including an audience’s critical reading and thinking skills. (shrink)

Das historische Buch konnen zahlreiche Rechtschreibfehler, fehlende Texte, Bilder, oder einen Index. Kaufer konnen eine kostenlose gescannte Kopie des Originals durch den Verlag. 1890. Nicht dargestellt. Auszug:... sicherere Prognose stellen konnte, schon drei Wochen vor dem Tode des Philosophen an Leibniz'): D. B. de S. vereor, ut brevi nos derelicturus sit, cum phtisis in dies ingravescere videatur. Funf Tage nach dem Tode Spinoza's ubermittelt Schuller diese schmerzliche Nachricht Leibniz und macht ihm dabei gleichzeitig das merkwurdige Anerbieten, er moge das dem (...) Nachlass entnommene, von Spinoza's Hand herruhrende Exemplar der Ethik fur 150 Gulden fur die Bibliothek des Herzogs von Hannover ankaufen: Caeterum te minime celare debui, clarissimum et acutissimum virum Spinozam maxima atrophia conflictatum 21./H-Februar. vitam suam cum morte commutasse. Videtur autem quod inexpectata mortis debilitate praeventus sit, quoniam sine testamento, ultimae voluntatis indice, a nobis discessit. Ethica, quam penes ipsum vidisti, in autogra-cp penes amicum asservatur2) venalisque habetur, si pretio opere tanto condigno persolvatur, ad quod nulli melius, quam Tibi significandum censui, utpote qui operis conscius principis animum dirigere poteris, ut suis sumtibus coematur3). Gegen eine solche unehrerbietige und geschaftsmassige Ausbeutung der litterarischen Hinterlassenschaft Spinoza's mussen die edler veranlagten Junger des Meisters, an ihrer Spitze wol Ludwig Meyer, entschiedene Einsprache erhoben haben. Denn im folgenden Briefe widerruft Schuller in angstlichem Tone sein unpassendes Angebot, und man merkt es den Zeilen an, dass die heftige Erregung, die uber den Nachlass im Amsterdamer Schuler ') Brief II, datirt: 6. Februar 1677. Dass das Luugenubel in seiner Familie hereditar war, ist ubrigens ein Novum. 2) Die... (shrink)

Largely in consequence of the acceptance of the Seventh Letter, there has even arisen a new concept of Plato, the man, and of his work....

This chapter identifies the central issue between Michael Dummett and Donald Davidson on the role of convention in language and argues they are not as far apart in the end as they take themselves to be.

This chapter reviews some of the history of discussions of logical form and offers a truth-theoretic account that traces back to Donald Davidson.

This article reports on the first stage of a research project on German university students’ conceptualization of Arab women and to what extent it is affected by the latters’ representation in the Western press during the Arab Spring. We combined discourse analysis and corpus-linguistic approaches to investigate the relationship between lexical items used by the students to express their attitudes toward Arab women and those featuring in news headlines about them published in British, American, and German news media. Results show (...) that the portrayal of Arab women in Western news headlines has a clear impact on German students’ opinions of them. The findings also show that our participants tend to be aware of this effect, which could be partly due to their familiarity with discourse analysis as students of linguistics. These results have implications for incorporating media education systematically in general university courses. (shrink)

There are two main interpretive positions on Davidson’s project in the theory of meaning. The Replacement Theory holds that Davidson aimed to replace the theory of meaning with the theory of truth on the grounds that meaning is too unclear a notion for systematic theorizing. The Traditional Pursuit Theory, in contrast, holds that Davidson aimed to pursue the traditional project with a clever bit of indirection, exploiting the recursive structure of a truth theory to reveal compositional semantic structure and placing (...) constraints on it sufficient for its canonical assignments of truth conditions to be used for interpretation. This paper responds to a recent defense of a sophisticated version of the Replacement Theory by Gary Ebbs according to which Davidson was engaged in a Carnapian explication of meaning, intending to preserve only aspects of the usage of ‘means’ most important to us. I argue the Explication Interpretation cannot be sustained in the face of a detailed look at the passages that principally motivate it in “Truth and Meaning” when we take into account their local context, their context in the paper as a whole, and the context of that paper in Davidson’s contemporaneous work, and later work which tries to improve the formulations which he advanced in his early papers. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: The present article explores two areas: a process based account of personhood and the meta-ethics of humility. The goal is to show that regulative virtues like humility play a prominent role in the development of humans as conceived by process philosophical accounts of personhood.

This is a broad-ranging and ambitious attempt to rethink aesthetic and literary studies in terms of an “anthropology” of symbolic media generally. Central to the author’s argument is the proposition that the idea of literature—at least as it has been understood in the West since the eighteenth century—as the paradigm for artistic experience is both limited and limiting. In its place, the author offers a more general theory of aesthetic experience appropriate to a wide range of media and geared toward (...) performativity and bodily experience. The author develops the idea of the “protoliterary” as a cultural-aesthetic discourse prior to and external to the “literary” as traditionally conceived in Western aesthetics. Manifestations of the protoliterary tend to occur within forms of multimedia theatricalization in which suggestive images of the body loom large. The appeal of the protoliterary lies in its ability to function on both cognitive and somatic levels, thereby neutralizing such distinctions as self/society and reality/fiction. The author’s argument is indebted to John Dewey’s belief in a basic human need for aesthetic experience, a need that can be met in a variety of ways, from tattoos and scarification, through sports, parades, and cosmetics, to literature, opera, and film. From this basis the book theorizes a history of the development of separate, hierarchical arts in the West while suggesting that independent histories of single arts and artistic experience are no longer desirable or even possible. Although the genesis of particular forms of media are inextricably linked to specific historical, sociological, and technological conditions, their potential functions and effects are not tied to those conditions, nor should they be. (shrink)

Gerechtigkeit lässt sich nicht ein für alle Mal herstellen, sondern nur für konkrete Zeitpunkte und Zeiträume konstatieren. Der Band veranschaulicht die zeitliche Dimension der Gerechtigkeit, die in der Ethik bisher kaum beachtet wurde.Wie lange sind menschliche Willensäußerungen als verbindlich anzusehen? Wie weit in die Zukunft und wie weit in die Vergangenheit reicht die Verantwortung, die wir für unsere Handlungen haben? Ist es plausibel, dass die Verantwortung für eine Handlung verjährt? Und welche Bedeutung kommt dem Verstreichen von Zeit bei der Allokation (...) knapper Güter und für die Gewährleistung von Chancengleichheit zu? Acht Rechtswissenschaftler, Philosophinnen und Philosophen geben darauf Antworten, die die normative Bedeutung des Vergehens von Zeit deutlich machen. Dabei zeigt sich, dass jede Theorie gerechter Verteilung dem Verstreichen von Zeit Rechnung tragen muss und Zukunftsethik sich nicht nur auf das Verteilungsparadigma stützen kann. (shrink)

Review of the three volumes of Davidson's papers: _Subjective, Intersubjective_, _Objective; Problems of Rationality_; _Truth, Language, and History_.

Verene's book reveals an intriguing view of the Phenomenology which should be welcomed by serious students of Hegel. As the title indicates, Verene focuses primarily on the role of recollection and imagery in the Phenomenology. He argues that there is a dialectical tension in Hegel's book between Bild and Begiff. By Bild, Verene means any thought or language based on images or tropes, as opposed to the discursive thought and language of speculative knowing through which alone the Begriff can be (...) adequately comprehended. Recollection functions solely in the medium of Bild; and such imagistic presentation, Verene maintains, provides the indispensable initial access to the Begriff which is subsequently grasped by speculative knowing. (shrink)

This is a masterful and insightful book written by an author well versed in both the history of philosophy and the analytic tradition. Indeed, one of Westphal’s aims is to reintegrate Hegel’s theory of knowledge into main stream epistemology. Westphal intends to study the aim and method of the Phenomenology of Spirit by means of a complete and detailed analysis and reconstruction of its introduction; however, his work is not meant to be an exhaustive treatment of the entire Phenomenology. Westphal’s (...) contention is that Hegel’s position is one of “epistemological realism,” and that “this view involves both an ontological thesis - there is a way the world is which does not depend on our cognitive or linguistic activity - and an epistemological thesis - we can know the way the world is”. Hegel thus rejects both skepticism and “subjectivism”. According to Westphal, Hegel “defends this realism by grounding it in a social and historical account of empirical knowledge”. (shrink)

This work brings in both the original German and English translation of over one hundred short essays in philosophical logic and the philosophy of mind of historical importance to understanding Wittgenstein's philosophical thought and development in the 1930's. Transcribed from the papers of Friedrich Waismann and dating from 1932-35, the majority are highly important dictations by Wittgenstein to Waismann, but also includes texts of redrafted material by Waismann closely based on the dictations. Many of these texts become the ultimate sources (...) of material on philosophy of language that constitutes the bulk of Waismann's book Logic, Sprache, Philosophy. The transcriptions throw light on the development of Wittgenstein's thought in this period and some of the topics are not covered in any of the existing publications of his writings, in particular his detailed attention to causal theories of meaning. They also contain texts covering psychological concepts such as expecting, intending and experience; these have no counterparts in Waismann's publications. (shrink)