According to standard assumptions in semantics, ordinary users of a language have implicit beliefs about the truth-conditions of sentences in that language, and they often agree on those beliefs. For example, it is assumed that if Anna and John are both competent users of English and the former utters ‘grass is green’ in conversation with the latter, they will both believe that that sentence is true if and only if grass is green. These assumptions play an important role (...) in an intuitively compelling picture of communication, according to which successful communication through literal assertoric utterances is normally effected thanks to our shared beliefs about the truth-conditions of the sentences uttered in the course of the conversation. Against these standard assumptions, this paper argues that the participants in a conversation rarely have the same beliefs about the truth-conditions of the sentences involved in a linguistic interaction. More precisely, it argues for Variance, the thesis that nearly every utterance is such that there is no proposition which more than one language user believes to be that utterance’s truth-conditional content. If Variance is true, we must reject the standard picture of communication. Towards the end of the paper I identify three ways in which ordinary conversations can be communication-like despite the truth of Variance and argue that the most natural amendments to the standard picture fail to explain them. (shrink)

Er ist wie Günter Grass, Martin Walser und Joseph Ratzinger 1927 geboren, Zeitgenosse von Habermas und Enzensberger und sein Leben verlief so spannend wie kein zweites seiner Generation. Die Mutter war Tänzerin bei Mary Wigman, sein Vater Kunsthistoriker. Seine Eltern waren links, atheistisch und lebten in der Berliner Bohème der Zwanziger Jahre. 1942, nach dem Tod seiner Mutter, wird der Vater zum katholischen Priester geweiht. 1944 ist Spaemann bei einem Bauer untergetaucht, er ist Deserteur im eigenen Land. Entdeckt (...) man ihn jetzt, wird er sofort erschossen. Heute ist Robert Spaemann der bedeutendste konservative Philosoph im In und Ausland. In einem langen Gespräch mit Stephan Sattler resümiert er sein Leben, ganz unter der Maxime der Suche nach dem, "was in Wahrheit ist". Spaemann ist der bedeutendste konservative Philosoph im In- und Ausland und bekennender Gegner der Nutzung der Atomkraft und der Genmanipulation. (shrink)

This book provides the first systematic presentation of anthropology's 'ontological turn', placing it in the landscape of contemporary social theory.

This chapter gives substance to the idea of a ‘communitarian value-driven epistemology’ by developing and combining ideas from Edward Craig's and Bernard Williams' ‘epistemic genealogy’ and Barry Barnes' and Steven Shapin's ‘sociology of knowledge’. In order to make transparent how this project might slot into more familiar, or more mainstream, projects, the paper maintains throughout a critical dialogue with Jon Kvanvig's position. The chapter is structured around an attempt to defend Craig's position against Kvanvig's criticisms: by treating the institution of (...) testimony as a collective good underwritten by the intrinsic and interrelated values of accuracy and sincerity; by rendering protoknowledge attributions as ascriptions of honour; and by allowing attributions of protoknowledge to be intertwined with attributions of freedom. The view that emerges is that the core of our knowledge practices comprises institutions of testimony, and that these practices are a collective good. (shrink)

There is widespread concern that the nature of mass politics changed during the late twentieth century, and indeed changed largely for the worse, in most post-industrial societies. The standard arguments are familiar and widely rehearsed. You can hear them echoed everyday, whether in simple or sophisticated versions, in the press, scattered in political speeches, and published in academe. Some arguments are cast in strictly empirical terms, but many popular accounts have strongly normative overtones.The intellectual roots lie in the classics of (...) political sociology from the late 1950s and mid-1960s, captured perhaps just as the era of traditional party campaigns was passing, notably the work of Maurice Duverger on mass-branch political parties and Stein Rokkan and Seymour Martin Lipset on social cleavages and electoral behaviour.The standard view emphasizes the consequences of the significant shift from direct party-oriented linkages between citizens and the state towards indirect media-oriented linkages in representative democracies. In the traditional model of election campaigns that characterized the ‘golden age’ of West European party politics, running from the expansion of the mass franchise in the late nineteenth century until at least the mid-twentieth century, party loyalists characteristically selected parliamentary representatives based on long-standing social cleavages and stable ideological cues.The core cleavages of class, religion, region, and language gave a collective meaning to party support and united people with shared identities and social roots who strived for broadly similar political ideals. As illustrated in Figure 1, in traditional campaigns political leaders communicated with grass-roots party loyalists via elected representatives and core party activists, using direct face-to-face channels of persuasion, organization and mobilization, such as local meetings, party newsletters, candidate pamphlets, doorstep canvassing, and town-hall speeches, supplemented by partisan newspapers.Collective organizations and traditional interest groups such as unions and churches, local cooperatives, community groups, and workers’ clubs, mobilized many citizens at the margins of political power and linked their interests to political parties. Support by party loyalists was regarded as a sign of trust in the ability of elected leaders to translate their programmatic principles into concrete policy actions. (shrink)

And, as The Promise of Salvation makes clear through abundant empirical evidence, religion will not disappear as long as these promises continue to help people ...

Graham Harman writes that the “basic dualism in the world lies…between things in their intimate reality and things as confronted by other things.” However, dualism implies irreconcilable difference; what Harman points to is better expressed as a dyad, where the two components imply one another and interact. This article shows that systems theory has long asserted the fundamental character of Harman’s dyad, expressing it as the union of internal structure and external function, which correspond exactly to what Levi Bryant, characterizing (...) Harman’s views, refers to as the intra-ontic and the inter-ontic, respectively. After interpreting Harman’s dyad in terms of the ontology of systems theory, the article illustrates his dyad with a variety of examples, including conceptions about truth, ethics, value, and intelligence. The structure–function dyad is a spatial conception of a system as an object. It is usefully augmented with a temporal dimension, expressed in a third component or with an additional orthogonal dyad. Adding a temporal dyad to the structure–function dyad joins the idea of an event and/or process to the idea of an object. (shrink)

Kant was a keen psychological observer and theorist of the forms, mechanisms and sources of self-deception. In this Element, the author discusses the role of rationalizing/Vernünfteln for Kant's moral psychology, normative ethics and philosophical methodology. By drawing on the full breadth of examples of rationalizing Kant discusses, the author shows how rationalizing can extend to general features of morality and corrupt rational agents thoroughly. Furthermore, the author explains the often-overlooked roles common human reason, empirical practical reason and even pure practical (...) reason play for rationalizing. Kant is aware that rationality is a double-edged sword; reason is the source of morality and of our dignity, but it also enables us to seemingly justify moral transgressions to ourselves, and it creates an interest in this justification in the first place. Finally, this Element discusses whether Kant's ethical theory itself can be criticised as a product of rationalizing. (shrink)

This book traces the development of theories of the self and personal identity from the ancient Greeks to the present day. From Plato and Aristotle to Freud and Foucault, Raymond Martin and John Barresi explore the works of a wide range of thinkers and reveal the larger intellectual trends, controversies, and ideas that have revolutionized the way we think about ourselves. The authors open with ancient Greece, where the ideas of Plato, Aristotle, and the materialistic atomists laid the groundwork (...) for future theories. They then discuss the ideas of the church fathers and medieval and Renaissance philosophers, including St. Paul, Philo, Augustine, Aquinas, and Montaigne. In their coverage of the emergence of a new mechanistic conception of nature in the seventeenth century, Martin and Barresi note a shift away from religious and purely philosophical notions of self and personal identity to more scientific and social conceptions, a trend that has continued to the present day. They explore modern philosophy and psychology, including the origins of different traditions within each discipline, and explain both the theoretical relevance of feminism and gender and ethnic studies and also the ways that Derrida and other recent thinkers have challenged the very idea that a unified self or personal identity even exists. Martin and Barresi cover a number of issues broached by philosophers and psychologists, such as the existence of a fixed and unchanging self and whether the concept of the soul has a use outside of religious contexts. They address the question of whether notions of the soul and the self are still viable in today's world. Together, they reveal the fascinating ways in which great thinkers have grappled with these and other questions and the astounding impact their ideas have had on the development of self-understanding in the west. (shrink)

Band 1. Moderne aus dem Untergrund -- Band 2. Clandestine Vernunft.

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections (...) in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. (shrink)

Over the years, the list of intellectuals who collaborated with the Nazis and their allies has gotten longer. Celebrated philosophers like Martin Heidegger and Paul de Man, celebrated novelists like Alain Robbe-Grillet and, more recently, Günter Grass have been placed on that list. The latter two authors put themselves on that list by publishing their memoirs.1 The nature of the misdeeds during the Nazi era ranged from carrying a Nazi party card and giving pro-Nazi lectures (Heidegger), to working (...) in an armament factory in Nazi Germany (Robbe-Grillet), to joining the SS elite corps (Grass), to contributing tendentious articles in the…. (shrink)

Discussion of sexuality in African cultures has a long history, but since the 1990s ethical reflections on homosexuality on the continent have often degenerated into furors and provoked a spate of anti-gay legislation in several countries. Refutations of homophobic dispositions encounter as barrier a pervasive belief in African cultures, that childbearing for community replenishment is a cherished moral duty. Several philosophers consider these to be exaggerated inhibitions that unjustifiably impede social acceptance of homosexuality, and have proposed as a solution what (...) they consider to be self-justifying political-moral principles, that terminate in value-pluralistic ideas such as the acceptance of the equality of sexual orientations and vindication of the right to the freedom to choose and satisfy sexual desire. I question the adequacy of such self-justificatory normative principles and consider the solutions they proffer as depreciating the moral point of the African pro-natalist position. Consequently, I develop a moral argument grounded in the ontology of Kwame Gyekye’s moderate communitarian theory of personhood as the most persuasive justification for homosexuality. (shrink)

Recent research illustrates substantial gaps between entrepreneurial intentions and behavior. This is a challenge for entrepreneurship promotion interventions that have primarily focused on stimulating entrepreneurial intentions. However, extant literature suggests that implementation intentions enhance the likelihood of acting congruently to the behavioral intention. Furthermore, theory also suggests the condition effects of situations and the perceived control over them. We therefore hypothesized that implementation intentions mediate the relationship between entrepreneurial intention and action, while perceived family support moderates the movement from implementation (...) intention to entrepreneurial action. Using two-wave survey data from a sample of students at an African university, we measured two psychological attributes as important precursors of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial intentions present before undertaking an innovations and entrepreneurship course. Implementation intentions regarding entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial actions, and perceived parental support for entrepreneurial activities were also measured 2 weeks after completion of the course. Our results demonstrate support for the proposed moderated double mediation model in which the effects of the two psychological attributes on entrepreneurial actions are explained via entrepreneurial intentions and implementation intentions. We further find moderation effects of perceived family support indicating that implementation intentions more likely predicted entrepreneurial actions in cases of higher family support. (shrink)

This book is a cultural phenomenology of doing physics. It describes the ways physicists actually do their work--their motives, and their ways of making sense of the world--so that outsiders can understand it. Martin H. Krieger explains that physicists employ a small number of everyday notions to get at the world experimentally and conceptually.

Although he was born in Spain, George Santayana became a uniquely American philosopher, critic, poet, and best-selling novelist. Along with his Harvard colleagues William James and Josiah Royce, he is best known as one of the founders of American pragmatism and recognized for his insights into the theory of knowledge, metaphysics, and moral philosophy. The Essential Santayana presents a selection of Santayana's most important and influential literary and philosophical work. Martin A. Coleman's critical introduction sets Santayana into the American (...) philosophical tradition and provides context for contemporary readers, many of whom may be approaching Santayana's writings for the first time. This landmark collection reveals the intellectual and literary diversity of one of American philosophy's most lively minds. (shrink)

This volumeincludes work from some of the most prominentcontemporary scholars in the humanities.

For regular sets in Euclidean space, previous work has identified twelve ‘basic’ computability notions to which many previous notions considered in literature were shown to be equivalent. With respect to those basic notions we now investigate on the computability of natural operations on regular sets: union, intersection, complement, convex hull, image, and pre-image under suitable classes of functions. It turns out that only few of these notions are suitable in the sense of rendering all those operations uniformly computable.

In [6] Messmer and Wood proved quantifier elimination for separably closed fields of finite Ershov invariant e equipped with a (certain) Hasse derivation. We propose a variant of their theory, using a sequence of e commuting Hasse derivations. In contrast to [6] our Hasse derivations are iterative.