Theodor Geigers Studie ist eine gesellschafts- und geistesgeschichtliche Einführung in einen zentralen philosophischen und soziologischen Grundbegriff. Sie gibt eine höchst originelle Antwort auf die alte Grundfrage der Gesellschaft: Welchen sozialen Normen und Werten sollte das menschliche Zusammenleben und Zusammenarbeiten unterliegen?

The paper was written for and planned to be published within the present collection of papers on Mood. Due to an editorial error, it has been published in Philosophia 45:2 773-787 rather than here.

Die wirtschaftliche und soziale Bedeutung der Juden im Mittelalter.--John Spencer's Erklärung der biblischen Gesetze in ihrer Beziehung zu Maimonides.--Max Webers Soziologie des antiken Judentums.--Zu Gabirols allegorischer Deutung der Erzählung vom Paradies.--Das Problem der Willensfreiheit bei Ḥasdai Crescas und den islamschen Aristotelikern.--Religion und Wissenschaft im mittelalterlichen und im modernen Denken.--Zur Kritik der Offenbarungsreligion in der islamischen und jüdischen Philosophie.--[Le-ḥeḳer ha-meḳorot shel Sefer ha-ʻiḳarim].--Die Akademie für die Wissenschaft des Judentums.--Die religiösen Motive in der Philosophie des Maimonides.--Das Problem der Kontingenz in der Philosophie (...) des Maimonides.--Die Normierung des Glaubensinhalts im Judentum.--Hermann Cohens Ethik. (shrink)

Liebe Grete Herrmann, besten Dank für Ihren Brief vom 19.5! Auch ich freue mich, Sie auf dem Pariser Kongreß zu sehen; wahrscheinlich werde ich auch an der vorangehenden Positivistentagung teilnehmen, also schon am 29.7. in Paris sein. Es interessiert mich, diese antimetaphysischen Metaphysiker einmal aus der Nähe zu beobachten. Ich werde sehen, es so einzurichten, daß ich eventuell auch nach dem Hauptkongreß noch einige Tage in Paris sein kann, um die von Ihnen angeregten Diskussionen mitzuführen. Jedenfalls hoffe ich auf einige (...) gründliche Gespräche mit Ihnen. (shrink)

Journal of Mathematical Logic, Ahead of Print. We investigate higher dimensional chain conditions, where the largeness notion is given by Fubini products of a given ideal. From strong saturation properties of an ideal, we derive abstractly versions of higher dimensional [math]-system lemma, which imply many posets, including any finite support iteration of [math]-centered posets and measure algebras, satisfy the higher dimensional chain conditions. We then show that if a poset satisfies a strengthening of the [math]-finite chain condition by Horn and (...) Tarski, then it satisfies higher dimensional chain conditions. As an application, we derive Ramsey-theoretic consequences, namely various partition hypotheses as studied by Bannister, Bergfalk, Moore and Todorcevic, from the existence of ideals satisfying strong chain conditions. (shrink)

The paper addresses a central problem in evolutionary biology and cognitive science; evolution of a neural based learning phenotype from a structured genotype. It describes morphogenesis of a neural network-based cognitive system, starting from a single genotype having a modulon control structure. It further shows how such a system, denoted as GALA architecture, growing its own recurrent axon connections, can further develop into various structures capable of learning in different learning modes, such as advice learning, reinforcement learning, and emotion learning. (...) The paper particularly considers the emotion learning systems and their motivational structure. A simulation experiment is provided to illustrate the theoretical issues discussed. (shrink)

The election of President Donald Trump, through his campaign of race-baiting, sexual harassment, and blatant disregard for human decency, lowered the moral bar of American public discourse. Julius Bailey’s latest book discusses the current state of hypocrisy and mistrust in the American political system, especially as these affect ethnic minorities and low-income groups. In powerful and inspiring prose, Bailey writes with a voice well informed by current events, empirical data, and philosophical observation. Bailey looks at the causes and consequences (...) of this new era and applies his passionate yet astute analysis to issues such as hate speech, gerrymandering, the use of the Confederate flag, and America’s relationship with the gun. _A percentage of the revenue from this book’s sales will be donated to two organizations: The Movement for Black Lives and Color of Change._. (shrink)

We examine the differences between three standard classes of forcing notions relative to the way they collapse the continuum. It turns out that proper and semi-proper posets behave differently in that respect from the class of posets that preserve stationary subsets of \.

We show that both Rado's Conjecture and strong Chang's Conjecture imply that there are no special ℵ2-Aronszajn trees if the Continuum Hypothesis fails. We give similar result for trees of higher heights and we also investigate the influence of Rado's Conjecture on square sequences.

We give an overview of a research line concentrated on finding to which extent compactness fails at the level of first uncountable cardinal and to which extent it could be recovered on some other perhaps not so large cardinal. While this is of great interest to set theorists, one of the main motivations behind this line of research is in its applicability to other areas of mathematics. We give some details about this and we expose some possible directions for further (...) research. (shrink)

Richard Rorty’s idealization of public dialogue pits literature and narrative against objectivity and ethics, thus leaving non-intellectual practitioners in the lurch. The evolutionary arc of Rorty’s oeuvre merits an assessment of the historiography he uses to prevent figures like Michel Foucault and Cornel West from being full participants in public dialogue. Miranda Fricker’s account of the collective explains confidence and transparency in an ironized ethical tradition that mediates irony and objectivity. Fricker’s mediation positions West’s use of Foucault’s to re-narrate pragmatism (...) as a way to embrace the process of rendering ethical experience universalizable. Ironized post-philosophical cultures can be explained responsibly by ironists within critically reflective ethical traditions. Confidence in pragmatism occurs when publics admit critical self-reflective inquiry from non-intellectuals. (shrink)

Respectively, Martin Buber and Richard Rorty imaginatively account for the philosophy and publicity of dialogue. Rorty’s account imagines dialogue as if the secularization of public political culture is inevitable. Buber’s account imagines a philosophy of dialogue in which religious considerations are unproblematic. Rorty’s repudiation of religion’s political influence results in an unnecessary estimation of the American government’s role in redressing social evils, especially those evils that are the result of the collective action of affiliated agents whose individual intentional choices are (...) not presumed blameworthy.2 Social evils obtain when choices accrue in associations and institutions that cause cruelty on a... (shrink)

Trees are natural generalizations of ordinals and this is especially apparent when one tries to find an uncountable analogue of the concept of the Scott-rank of a countable structure. The purpose of this paper is to introduce new methods in the study of an ordering between trees whose analogue is the usual ordering between ordinals. For example, one of the methods is the tree-analogue of the successor operation on the ordinals.

Friedrich Brunstäd, von Haus aus Philosoph in der Tradition Hegels, galt lange als vergessener Theologe des 20. Jahrhunderts, obwohl er zu Lebzeiten über eine grosse Wirksamkeit verfügte. Die vorliegende Studie entreisst ihn dem Vergessen und verortet ihn grundlegend in der theologisch-philosophischen Landschaft seiner Zeit. Brunstäd arbeitete an einer theologischen Hegel-Rezeption, die die programmatische Weichenstellung des Hegel'schen Ansatzes, die Philosophie der Theologie überzuordnen, bewusst nicht mitvollzog. In seinen sozialethischen Grundüberzeugungen wurde er von Reinhold Seeberg geprägt, den er in der Weimarer Republik (...) als Vordenker des christlich-sozialen Protestantismus beerbte. Brunstäd übte als Mitglied im Hauptvorstand der DNVP zeitweilig auch politisch einigen Einfluss aus. Nach 1933 galt sein Interesse der Wahrung der kirchenpolitischen und theologischen Integrität des Luthertums. Die vorliegende Studie erschliesst zum einen das hohe Reflexionsniveau seiner Hegel-Rezeption, zum anderen zeigt sie anhand seiner Person zentrale Problemstellungen im politischen Weg des deutschen Protestantismus nach 1918 auf. (shrink)

Morality is often thought of as non-rational or sub-rational. In Moral Notions, first published in 1967, Julius Kovesi argues that the rationality of morality is built into the way we construct moral concepts. In showing this he also resolves the old Humean conundrum of the relation between 'facts' and 'values'. And he puts forward a method of reasoning that might make 'applied ethics' (at present largely a hodge-podge of opinions) into a constructive discipline. Kovesi's general theory of concepts - (...) important in its own right - is indebted to his interpretation of Plato, and his three papers on Plato, first published here, explain this debt. This new edition of Moral Notions also includes a foreward by Philippa Foot, a biography of the author, and a substantial afterword in which the editors, Robert Ewin and Alan Tapper, explain the signficance of Kovesi's work. (shrink)

Silver medalist for the IPPY award for Current Events in 2016! _Racial Realities and Post-Racial Dreams_ is a moral call, a harkening and quickening of the spirit, a demand for recognition for those whose voices are whispered. Julius Bailey straddles the fence of social-science research and philosophy, using empirical data and current affairs to direct his empathy-laced discourse. He turns his eye to President Obama and his critics, racism, income inequality, poverty, and xenophobia, guided by a prophetic thread that (...) calls like-minded visionaries and progressives to action. The book is an honest look at the current state of our professed city on a hill and the destruction left on the darker sides of town. (shrink)

Recent years have seen a surge in philosophical work on the rationality of grief. Much of this research is premised on the idea that people tend to grieve much less than would be appropriate or, as it is often called, fitting. My goal in this paper is diagnostic, that is, to articulate two never properly distinguished, and indeed often conflated, arguments in favour of the purported discrepancy between experienced and fitting grief: a metaphysical and a psychological argument. According to the (...) former, grief is rationalized entirely by facts about the past. And because the past is unchangeable, grief can be said to remain forever fitting. According to the latter argument, humans’ emotional resilience causes grief to diminish at a faster rate than would be fitting. Which of these problems we end up facing depends on relatively subtle variations in the characterization of the losses that render grief appropriate. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the relationship between trust and inquiry to argue for the view that A trusts B to act in some way only if A believes, in a way that she cannot distinguish from knowledge, for reasons of trust, that B will (or has) act(ed) in this way. Call such beliefs ‘outright trusting beliefs’. To support this view, I shall argue, by way of various examples, that the conditions under which inquiry erodes trust are the same as the conditions (...) under which inquiry erodes outright trusting belief. This congruence is easily explained abductively if we take trust to involve such a belief constitutively. While philosophers have sometimes thought that the relationship between trust and inquiry threatens or complicates the doxastic account of trust, the argument presented here suggests, surprisingly, that this relationship supports and even strengthens this account. (shrink)