T. 1. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Nachahmungsästhetik und Affektenlehre sowie der idealistischen Musikästhetik in Deutschland.--T. 2. Die Romantik und der Kampf ästhetische Richtungen.

I show that the recent account of levels in neuroscience proposed by Craver and Bechtel is unsatisfactory since it fails to provide a plausible criterion for being at the same level and is incompatible with Craver and Bechtel’s account of downward causation. Furthermore, I argue that no distinct notion of levels is needed for analyzing explanations and causal issues in neuroscience: it is better to rely on more well-defined notions such as composition and scale. One outcome of this is that (...) apparent cases of downward causation can be analyzed away. (shrink)

Recent years have seen an explosion of empirical data concerning arithmetical cognition. In this paper that data is taken to be philosophically important and an outline for an empirically feasible epistemological theory of arithmetic is presented. The epistemological theory is based on the empirically well-supported hypothesis that our arithmetical ability is built on a protoarithmetical ability to categorize observations in terms of quantities that we have already as infants and share with many nonhuman animals. It is argued here that arithmetical (...) knowledge developed in such a way cannot be totally conceptual in the sense relevant to the philosophy of arithmetic, but neither can arithmetic understood to be empirical. Rather, we need to develop a contextual a priori notion of arithmetical knowledge that preserves the special mathematical characteristics without ignoring the roots of arithmetical cognition. Such a contextual a priori theory is shown not to require any ontologically problematic assumptions, in addition to fitting well within a standard framework of general epistemology. (shrink)

This paper combines two ideas: (1) That the Lewisian best system analysis of lawhood (BSA) can cope with laws that have exceptions (cf. Braddon-Mitchell in Noûs 35(2):260–277, 2001; Schrenk in The metaphysics of ceteris paribus laws. Ontos, Frankfurt, 2007). (2) That a BSA can be executed not only on the mosaic of perfectly natural properties but also on any set of special science properties (cf., inter alia, Schrenk 2007, Selected papers contributed to the sections of GAP.6, 6th international congress of (...) the society for analytical philosophy. Mentis, Paderborn/Münster, 2008; Cohen and Callender in Philos Stud 145:1–34, 2009, Erkenntnis 73:427–447, 2010). Bringing together (1) and (2) results in an analysis of special science ceteris paribus laws. (shrink)

The luck argument raises a serious challenge for libertarianism about free will. In broad outline, if an action is undetermined, then it appears to be a matter of luck whether or not one performs it. And if it is a matter of luck whether or not one performs an action, then it seems that the action is not performed with free will. This argument is most effective against event-causal accounts of libertarianism. Recently, Franklin (Philosophical Studies 156:199–230, 2011) has defended event-causal (...) libertarianism against four formulations of the luck argument. I will argue that three of Franklin’s responses are unsuccessful and that there are important versions of the luck challenge that his defense has left unaddressed. (shrink)

The paper develops an account of minimal traces devoid of representational content and exploits an analogy to a predictive processing framework of perception. As perception can be regarded as a prediction of the present on the basis of sparse sensory inputs without any representational content, episodic memory can be conceived of as a “prediction of the past” on the basis of a minimal trace, i.e., an informationally sparse, merely causal link to a previous experience. The resulting notion of episodic memory (...) will be validated as a natural kind distinct from imagination. This trace minimalist view contrasts with two theory camps dominating the philosophical debate on memory. On one side, we face versions of the Causal Theory that hold on to the idea that episodic remembering requires a memory trace that causally links the event of remembering to the event of experience and carries over representational content from the content of experience to the content of remembering. The Causal Theory, however, fails to account for the epistemic generativity of episodic memory and is psychologically and information-theoretically implausible. On the other side, a new camp of simulationists is currently forming up. Motivated by empirical and conceptual deficits of the Causal Theory, they reject not only the necessity of preserving representational content, but also the necessity of a causal link between experience and memory. They argue that remembering is nothing but a peculiar form of imagination, peculiar only in that it has been reliably produced and is directed towards an episode of one’s personal past. Albeit sharing their criticism of the Causal Theory and, in particular, rejecting its demand for an intermediary carrier of representational content, the paper argues that a causal connection to experience is still necessary to fulfill even the minimal requirements of past-directedness and reliability. (shrink)

Empirical evidence challenges many of the assumptions that underlie traditional philosophical and commonsense conceptions of human agency. It has been suggested that this evidence threatens also to undermine free will and moral responsibility. In this paper, I will focus on the purported threat to moral responsibility. The evidence challenges assumptions concerning the ability to exercise conscious control and to act for reasons. This raises an apparent challenge to moral responsibility as these abilities appear to be necessary for morally responsible agency. (...) I will argue that this challenge collapses once the underlying conditions on moral responsibility are specified in sufficient detail. I will argue, in other words, that the empirical evidence does not support a challenge to the assumption that we are, in general, morally responsible agents. In the final section, I will suggest that empirical research on human agency is nevertheless relevant to various questions about moral responsibility. (shrink)

Computer assisted theorem proving is an increasingly important part of mathematical methodology, as well as a long-standing topic in artificial intelligence (AI) research. However, the current generation of theorem proving software have limited functioning in terms of providing new proofs. Importantly, they are not able to discriminate interesting theorems and proofs from trivial ones. In order for computers to develop further in theorem proving, there would need to be a radical change in how the software functions. Recently, machine learning results (...) in solving mathematical tasks have shown early promise that deep artificial neural networks could learn symbolic mathematical processing. In this paper, I analyze the theoretical prospects of such neural networks in proving mathematical theorems. In particular, I focus on the question how such AI systems could be incorporated in practice to theorem proving and what consequences that could have. In the most optimistic scenario, this includes the possibility of autonomous automated theorem provers (AATP). Here I discuss whether such AI systems could, or should, become accepted as active agents in mathematical communities. (shrink)

Hume glaubte, die Kausalverknüpfung sei eine „secret connection“, also eine Verknüpfung, die mindestens unerkennbar, wenn nicht sogar inexis- tent ist. Einige moderne Gegner Humes halten dem entgegen, dass apos- teriorisch entdeckte, metaphysische Notwendigkeit, wie wir sie bei- spielsweise von Kripke und Putnam kennen, diejenige objektiv-reale Verknüpfung in der Welt ist, die auch die Rolle einer kausalen Verknüp- fung in der Welt spielen kann. Ich hinterfrage diese anti-Hume’sche Identifizierung kausaler mit me- taphysischer Notwendigkeit, zeige aber auch einen anderen Weg auf, kausale (...) Kräfte zu postulieren: Wenn unsere willentlichen Handlungen auf Widerstände in der Welt stoßen, haben wir (direkten) Beobachtungszu- gang zu einer Verknüpfung in der Welt, die mindestens einen essentiellen Teil kausaler Kraft ausmacht. (shrink)

One of the most fundamental questions in the philosophy of mathematics concerns the relation between truth and formal proof. The position according to which the two concepts are the same is called deflationism, and the opposing viewpoint substantialism. In an important result of mathematical logic, Kurt Gödel proved in his first incompleteness theorem that all consistent formal systems containing arithmetic include sentences that can neither be proved nor disproved within that system. However, such undecidable Gödel sentences can be established to (...) be true once we expand the formal system with Alfred Tarski s semantical theory of truth, as shown by Stewart Shapiro and Jeffrey Ketland in their semantical arguments for the substantiality of truth. According to them, in Gödel sentences we have an explicit case of true but unprovable sentences, and hence deflationism is refuted. -/- Against that, Neil Tennant has shown that instead of Tarskian truth we can expand the formal system with a soundness principle, according to which all provable sentences are assertable, and the assertability of Gödel sentences follows. This way, the relevant question is not whether we can establish the truth of Gödel sentences, but whether Tarskian truth is a more plausible expansion than a soundness principle. In this work I will argue that this problem is best approached once we think of mathematics as the full human phenomenon, and not just consisting of formal systems. When pre-formal mathematical thinking is included in our account, we see that Tarskian truth is in fact not an expansion at all. I claim that what proof is to formal mathematics, truth is to pre-formal thinking, and the Tarskian account of semantical truth mirrors this relation accurately. -/- However, the introduction of pre-formal mathematics is vulnerable to the deflationist counterargument that while existing in practice, pre-formal thinking could still be philosophically superfluous if it does not refer to anything objective. Against this, I argue that all truly deflationist philosophical theories lead to arbitrariness of mathematics. In all other philosophical accounts of mathematics there is room for a reference of the pre-formal mathematics, and the expansion of Tarkian truth can be made naturally. Hence, if we reject the arbitrariness of mathematics, I argue in this work, we must accept the substantiality of truth. Related subjects such as neo-Fregeanism will also be covered, and shown not to change the need for Tarskian truth. -/- The only remaining route for the deflationist is to change the underlying logic so that our formal languages can include their own truth predicates, which Tarski showed to be impossible for classical first-order languages. With such logics we would have no need to expand the formal systems, and the above argument would fail. From the alternative approaches, in this work I focus mostly on the Independence Friendly (IF) logic of Jaakko Hintikka and Gabriel Sandu. Hintikka has claimed that an IF language can include its own adequate truth predicate. I argue that while this is indeed the case, we cannot recognize the truth predicate as such within the same IF language, and the need for Tarskian truth remains. In addition to IF logic, also second-order logic and Saul Kripke s approach using Kleenean logic will be shown to fail in a similar fashion. (shrink)

Die Interpretationen in diesem Band verfolgen das Ziel, das antike Ideal des Wissens historisch zu rekonstruieren, dem die klassische Philosophie ihre Gestalt verdankt. Denn bei Platon und bei Aristoteles hat die Wissenschaft noch Funktionen zu erfüllen, von denen heute in einer modernen Gesellschaft nur selten die Rede ist: Sie unterhält Beziehungen zu Fragen der antiken Religion, sie will die menschliche Seele von Schlamm befreien und der Begründung einer wahren Ordnung der Gesellschaft dienen. Der Weg von der göttlichen Logik zur menschlichen (...) Politik ist der steile Weg des Philosophen, auf dem er sich denkend abmüht. Winkt ihm dort oben auch die Glückseligkeit der Götter, stellt sich dem Philosophen hier doch zuallererst die Frage: Welche Politik? (shrink)

This 44-chapter volume tackles a quickly-evolving field of inquiry, mapping the existing discourse as part of a general attempt to place current developments in historical context; at the same time, breaking new ground in taking on novel subjects and pursuing fresh approaches. The term "A.I." is used to refer to a broad range of phenomena, from machine learning and data mining to artificial general intelligence. The recent advent of more sophisticated AI systems, which function with partial or full autonomy and (...) are capable of tasks which require learning and 'intelligence', presents difficult ethical questions, and has drawn concerns from many quarters about individual and societal welfare, democratic decision-making, moral agency, and the prevention of harm. This work ranges from explorations of normative constraints on specific applications of machine learning algorithms today-in everyday medical practice, for instance-to reflections on the (potential) status of AI as a form of consciousness with attendant rights and duties and, more generally still, on the conceptual terms and frameworks necessarily to understand tasks requiring intelligence, whether "human" or "A.I.". (shrink)

The relationship between psychological states and the brain remains an unresolved issue in philosophy of psychology. One appealing solution that has been influential both in science and in philosophy is Dennett’s concept of the intentional stance, according to which beliefs and desires are real and objective phenomena, but not necessarily states of the brain. A fundamental shortcoming of this approach is that it does not seem to leave any causal role for beliefs and desires in influencing behavior. In this paper, (...) I show that intentional states ascribed from the intentional stance should be seen as real causes, develop this to an independently plausible ontological position, and present a response to the latest interventionist causal exclusion worries. (shrink)

How would it be assessed from an ethical point of view if human wage work were replaced by artificially intelligent systems (AI) in the course of an automation process? An answer to this question has been discussed above all under the aspects of individual well-being and social justice. Although these perspectives are important, in this article, we approach the question from a different perspective: that of leading a meaningful life, as understood in analytical ethics on the basis of the so-called (...) meaning-in-life debate. Our thesis here is that a life without wage work loses specific sources of meaning, but can still be sufficiently meaningful in certain other ways. Our starting point is John Danaher’s claim that ubiquitous automation inevitably leads to an achievement gap. Although we share this diagnosis, we reject his provocative solution according to which game-like virtual realities could be an adequate substitute source of meaning. Subsequently, we outline our own systematic alternative which we regard as a decidedly humanistic perspective. It focuses both on different kinds of social work and on rather passive forms of being related to meaningful contents. Finally, we go into the limits and unresolved points of our argumentation as part of an outlook, but we also try to defend its fundamental persuasiveness against a potential objection. (shrink)

I argue for the possibility of a proprioceptive art in addition to, for example, visual or auditory arts, where aspects of some martial arts will serve as examples of that art form. My argument is inspired by a thought of Ted Shawn’s, one of the pioneers of American modern dance: "Dance is the only art wherein we ourselves are the stuff in which it is made.” In a first step, I point out that in some practices of martial arts (in (...) the paper I will introduce “hyongs” & “katas”), we are, too, the stuff these performances are made of. Second, I show that we, as martial arts practitioners, are not in the first place visual or auditorial observers (as common in painting or music or ballet) but introspective, proprioceptive perceivers of our bodies and their movements. (As a corollary we get that we are, in such a case, necessarily our exclusive audience.) In an third crucial step, I show that the martial arts practices referred to, hyongs & katas, and especially the proprioceptive aspects thereof, can indeed count as art. Thus, proprioceptive art is possible because some practices of some martial arts are actual existing examples of that art form. (shrink)

This chapter reviews empirical research on the rules governing assertion and retraction, with a focus on the normative role of truth. It examines whether truth is required for an assertion to be considered permissible, and whether there is an expectation that speakers retract statements that turn out to be false. Contrary to factive norms (such as the influential “knowledge norm”), empirical data suggests that there is no expectation that speakers only make true assertions. Additionally, contrary to truth-relativist accounts, there is (...) no requirement for speakers to retract statements that are false at the context of assessment. We conclude by suggesting that truth still plays a crucial role in the evaluation of assertions: as a standard for evaluating their success, rather than permissibility. (shrink)

Finding causes is a central goal in psychological research. In this paper, I argue based on the interventionist approach to causal discovery that the search for psychological causes faces great obstacles. Psychological interventions are likely to be fat-handed: they change several variables simultaneously, and it is not known to what extent such interventions give leverage for causal inference. Moreover, due to problems of measurement, the degree to which an intervention was fat-handed, or more generally, what the intervention in fact did, (...) is difficult to reliably estimate. A further complication is that the causal findings in psychology are typically made at the population level, and such findings do not allow inferences to individual-level causal relationships. I also discuss the implications of these problems for research, as well as various ways of addressing them, such as focusing more on the discovery of robust but non-causal patterns. (shrink)

In The Crisis of the European Union Jürgen Habermas claims that the constituent power in the EU is shared between the community of EU citizens and the political communities of the member states. By his own account, Habermas arrives at this concept of a dual constituent subject through a rational reconstruction of the genesis of the European constitution. This explanation, however, is not particularly illuminating since it is controversial what the term ‘rational reconstruction’ stands for. This article critically discusses the (...) current state of research on rational reconstruction, develops a new reading of Habermas’ method and invokes this account for an explanation and evaluation of the notion of a European pouvoir constituant mixte. (shrink)

In their article “What are Humans Doing in the Loop? Co-Reasoning and Practical Judgment When Using Machine Learning-Driven Decision Aids,” Salloch and Eriksen (2024) propose involving patients as...

The article explores the relationship between visual culture and the fight for visibility and attention in contemporary society. It draws on a concept of visual culture which not only sees the rising significance of the visual and the proliferation of images as its defining traits, but also the fact that, today, people are—to a much higher degree—both consumers as well as producers of images. Based on this definition, it is argued that in visually oriented communication and media societies, the anthropologically (...) fundamental need for attention manifests itself as a fight for visibility which takes on the form of ever more extreme forms of public self-display. Furthermore, a portrait of two social figures—the star and the voyeur—will serve as further analysis and description of the social trends which can be tied to the emergence of today's visual culture. The article will close by discussing attention and visibility in terms of inclusion and exclusion and by proposing an analytical model for differentiating four modes of existence in a visual culture. (shrink)

The doctrine that meanings are entitieswith a determinate and independent reality is often believed tohave been undermined by Quine's thought experiment of radicaltranslation, which results in an argument for the indeterminacy oftranslation. This paper argues to the contrary. Starting fromQuine's assumption that the meanings of observation sentences arestimulus meanings, i.e., set-theoretical constructions of neuronalstates uniquely determined by inter-subjectively observable facts,the paper shows that this meaning assignment, up to isomorphism,is uniquely extendable to all expressions that occur inobservation sentences. To do so, (...) a theorem recently proven byHodges is used. To derive the conclusion, one only has to assumethat languages are compositional, abide by a generalized contextprinciple and by what I call the category principle. Theseassumptions originating in Frege and Husserl are coherent withQuine's overall position. It is concluded that Quine'snaturalistic approach does not justify scepticism with regard tomeaning, but should rather result in a view that affiliatessemantics with neuroscience. (shrink)

Although the concept of “AI governance” is frequently used in the debate, it is still rather undertheorized. Often it seems to refer to the mechanisms and structures needed to avoid “bad” outcomes and achieve “good” outcomes with regard to the ethical problems artificial intelligence is thought to actualize. In this article we argue that, although this outcome-focused view captures one important aspect of “good governance,” its emphasis on effects runs the risk of overlooking important procedural aspects of good AI governance. (...) One of the most important properties of good AI governance is political legitimacy. Starting out from the assumptions that AI governance should be seen as global in scope and that political legitimacy requires at least a democratic minimum, this article has a twofold aim: to develop a theoretical framework for theorizing the political legitimacy of global AI governance, and to demonstrate how it can be used as a compass for critially assessing the legitimacy of actual instances of global AI governance. Elaborating on a distinction between “governance by AI” and “governance of AI” in relation to different kinds of authority and different kinds of decision-making leads us to the conclusions that much of the existing global AI governance lacks important properties necessary for political legitimacy, and that political legitimacy would be negatively impacted if we handed over certain forms of decision-making to artificial intelligence systems. (shrink)

The two main domains of high culture - the arts and the sciences - seem to be completely different, simply unrelated. Is there any sense then in talking about culture in the singular as a unity? A positive answer to this question presupposes that there is a single conceptual scheme, in terms of which it is possible to articulate both the underlying similarities and the basic differences between these domains. This article argues that - at least in respect of ‘classical’ (...) modernity - there is such a framework: the normatively conceived Author-Work-Recipient relation. It allows the disclosure of the paradoxical unity of culture: its two main realms are constituted as polar opposites and thus as strictly complementary. Through such an organization, culture could fulfil an affirmative, compensatory role. At the same time however, it also allowed culture to acquire the character of social critique, a function realized through the antagonistically opposed projects of Enlightenment and Romanticism - projects whose illusions are now evident. (shrink)

The Complex-First Paradox consists in a set of collectively incompatible but individually well-confirmed propositions that regard the evolution, development, and cortical realization of the meanings of concrete nouns. Although these meanings are acquired earlier than those of other word classes, they are semantically more complex and their cortical realizations more widely distributed. For a neurally implemented syntaxsemantics interface, it should thus take more effort to establish a link between a concept and its lexical expression. However, in ontogeny and phylogeny, capabilities (...) demanding more effort, ceteris paribus, develop and evolve later than those demanding less effort. The paradox points to an explanatory deficit in linguistic theory. (shrink)

Schelling entwirft in seiner Spätphilosophie einen neuen Philosophietypus, der in Konkurrenz zu Hegels Metaphysik tritt. Dabei greift er Hegel nicht nur auf dem Gebiet fundamentaler theoretischen Annahmen an, sondern sucht ihn insbesondere durch einen neuen Begriff von Religion zu überbieten. Die Arbeit untersucht dies im Ausgang von Schellings "Philosophie der Mythologie".

In this paper, I study the kind of questions we can ask about the existence of numbers. In addition to asking whether numbers exist, and how, I argue that there is also a third relevant question: why numbers exist. In platonist and nominalist accounts this question may not make sense, but in the psychologist account I develop, it is as well-placed as the other two questions. In fact, there are two such why-questions: the causal why-question asks what causes numbers to (...) exist and the teleological why-question asks for what purpose numbers exist. I argue that in a psychologist constructivist account, in which numbers are understood to exist as referents of a particular type of culturally shared concepts, both why-questions can get plausible answers. (shrink)

In 1927, Paul Dirac first explicitly introduced the idea that electrodynamical processes can be evaluated by decomposing them into virtual (modern terminology), energy non-conserving subprocesses. This mode of reasoning structured a lot of the perturbative evaluations of quantum electrodynamics during the 1930s. Although the physical picture connected to Feynman diagrams is no longer based on energy non-conserving transitions but on off-shell particles, emission and absorption subprocesses still remain their fundamental constituents. This article will access the introduction and the initial reception (...) of this picture of subsequent transitions (PST) by conceiving of concepts, models, and their representations as tools for the practitioners. I will argue for a multi-factorial explanation of Dirac’s initial, verbally explicit introduction: the mathematical representation he had developed was highly suggestive and already partly conceptualized; Dirac was philosophical flexible enough to talk about transitions when no actual transitions, according to the general interpretation of quantum mechanics of the time, occurred; and, importantly, Dirac eventually used the verbal exposition in the same paper in which he introduced it. The direct impact of PST on the conception of quantum electrodynamical processes will be exemplified by its reflection in diagrammatical representations. The study of the diverging ontological commitments towards PST immediately after its introduction opens up the prehistory of a philosophical debate that stretches out into the present: the dispute about the representational and ontological status of the physical picture connected to the evaluation of the perturbative series of QED and QFT. (shrink)

We critically analyze Alexander Rosenberg’s argument based on the multiple realizability of biological properties that there are no biological laws. The argument is intuitive and suggestive. Nevertheless, a closer analysis reveals that the argument rests on dubious assumptions about the nature of natural selection, laws of nature, and multiple realizability. We also argue that the argument is limited in scope, since it applies to an outmoded account of laws and the applicability of the argument to other more promising accounts of (...) laws is questionable. Another concern of ours is that the relation between multiple realizability and natural selection is more complex than Rosenberg acknowledges. Finally, we claim that an explanation for why Rosenberg’s argument appears persuasive and appealing is that the argument is based on an inflated concept of multiple realizability that rests on unreliable intuitions concerning what counts as a different realization of the same property. Consequently, we argue that the argument is at best inconclusive and at worst false insofar as its implications for the existence of biological laws are concerned. (shrink)

Journal Name: SATS Issue: Ahead of print.

The question the author seeks to answer in this article is: What does God’s transcendence imply for the possibility of human thinking and talking about God? In an analysis of the concept of transcendence the author defines ‘divine transcendence’ as: God’s being other than the universe in going beyond its limits and limitations. God’s transcendence as regards human thinking is phrased as conceptual transcendence and defined as God’s otherness in going beyond the limits of human thinking. Four sorts of limits (...) of human thinking are presented. Firstly, there are limits of intelligence that limit the range of human comprehension. Secondly, three rational limits are offered, resulting from an analysis of the concept of rationality. Categorial rationality limits are used to distinguish thinking of the category of rational beings from that of non-rational beings. Limits of formal rationality demarcate thinking as rational in an evaluative sense with the help of formal criteria. Such criteria consist in correct procedures to arrive at a certain thought and in the logical criteria of consistency and coherence. Finally, material rationality limits delimit thinking which is adequate in relation to specific circumstances. For instance, a belief is materially rational insofar as it corresponds to the actual state of affairs to which it refers; in other words, when it is true. In this article it is argued that God transcends these limits of human thinking in two ways. Firstly, God transcends these limits because they do not apply to His “thinking”, or better, to His intellectual consciousness. This is called intrinsic conceptual transcendence. Secondly, God transcends the limits of human thinking because human thinking is limited to such an extent that it is hindered to think God. This is extrinsic conceptual transcendence. As regards God’s intrinsic conceptual transcendence of the four limits of human thinking, the author concludes that God’s intellectual consciousness has intelligence in the most perfect way, is categorially rational in the most perfect way, is not formally rational but intuitively rational, and is materially rational in the most perfect way. As to God’s extrinsic conceptual transcendence, it is concluded that God is only incompletely and partly within the range of human intelligence, is also incompletely and partly within the range of the categorially rational human thinking, is within the range of human formal rationality , and is only incompletely and partly within the limits of human material rationality. This whole discussion has the following three consequences for human thinking about God. Firstly, humans can partly comprehend and think God, at least sufficiently to live their lives coram Deo. Secondly, human imperfection urges to modesty and awe in thinking and talking about God. Thirdly, in that which humans can think about God, they have to try to use the same correct procedures and logical rules which they use in thinking about other parts of reality. (shrink)