In this paper I will consider the relationship between cultural pluralism and moral education. I will first outline necessary conditions for a society to be culturally pluralistic, and will then attempt to outline conditions for an ideal culturally pluralistic society. These conditions, particularly the conditions for an ideal culturally pluralistic society, suggest approaches to moral education. Implicit in the conditions are certain moral values which can be taught and can have a central place in moral education. The outline of an (...) ideal culturally pluralistic society and the moral values implicit in the outline suggest reasons for adopting ideal cultural pluralism as a model for a democratic society. (shrink)

“Real knowledge,” as I use the term, is the most highly prized form of true belief sought by an epistemic agent. This paper argues that defeasible infinitism provides a good way to characterize real knowledge and it shows how real knowledge can arise from fallible justification. Then, I argue that there are two ways of interpreting Ernest Sosa's account of real knowledge as belief that is aptly formed and capable of being fully defended. On the one hand, if beliefs (...) are aptly formed only if they have a specific causal etiology, namely that they are efficiently caused fully or partially by virtuous characteristics of the epistemic agent, then Sosa's account falls prey to what I call the problem of the Hazard of Empirical Disconfirmation. The HED problem applies to all forms of causal accounts of real knowledge and is simply that as we gain more empirical knowledge about the causal origins of our true beliefs that are the most highly prized we will discover that they do not always satisfy the required efficient causal constraints. Bluntly put, having sufficiently good reasons for our beliefs might not require that the beliefs have the requisite efficient causal etiology. On the other hand, there is a way of interpreting Sosa's views that does not include an efficient causal prerequisite. That interpretation makes Sosa's account of real knowledge almost identical to defeasible infinitism but expressed in an alternate vocabulary. Such a view is not subject to the HED problem and it can solve the deep problem in epistemology, namely how to get epistemically certain knowledge from fallible justification. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Consideration of (T1) Consideration of (T2).

Unlike the overall framework of Ernest Nagel's work on reduction, his theory of intertheoretic connection still has life in it. It handles aptly cases where reduction requires complex representation of a target domain. Abandoning his formulation as too liberal was a mistake. Arguments that it is too liberal at best touch only Nagel's deductivist theory of explanation, not his condition of connectability. Taking this condition seriously gives a powerful view of reduction, but one which requires us to index explanatory (...) power to sciences as they are formulated at particular times. While we may thereby reduce more than philosophers have supposed, we must abandon hope (as Nagel did) of saying anything useful about reductionism. (shrink)

Die Beziehung zwischen Theodor W. Adorno und Paul Celan steckt voller Widersprüche. Ihr Briefwechsel aus den sechziger Jahren ist spärlich, persönliche Begegnungen sind selten. Hinzu kommt: Celan fühlt sich von Adornos ersten skeptischen Sätzen über Gedichte nach Auschwitz angegriffen und äussert sich privat überaus kritisch zu Adornos Haltung zum Judentum. Andererseits liest Celan intensiv Adornos Schriften und wünscht sich einen Essay von ihm über sein Werk. Und Adorno? Der schreibt zwar nicht den versprochenen Essay, hält aber Celan für den bedeutendsten (...) deutschsprachigen Lyriker nach 1945. Der Grund für diese wechselseitige Wertschätzung liegt in der ausgeprägten Affinität ihrer Dichtung und Philosophie, die ein Grossteil der Forschung bis heute unterschätzt. Ausgehend von der aporetischen Situation von Kunst nach Auschwitz wenden sie sich dem Absurden und Dunklen zu und entwerfen eine Ästhetik des Bilderverbots. 'Kunstfeindschaft ' und 'Involution' heissen die Schlagworte ihrer geistigen Verwandtschaft, die jedoch eine wichtige Grenze hat. Während jüdische Erfahrungen Celans Lyrik tief prägen, subsumiert Adorno diese oft genug seiner -- wenn auch negativen -- dialektischen Logik. (shrink)

Dieses kleine Buch, wiewohl seine Teile auf eigenen Füßen stehen können, Teile, die einander zunächst nicht kannten, kommend aus verschiedenen Ländern, ihren Ursprung der Gelegenheit dankend, dem Zufall oder dem Einfall, will doch als Einheit verstanden werden, als die Einheit einer Idee. Sie kommen vom Gedanken her, alle aber niemals ohne das Bild, weil niemals ohne die Liebe für das Konkrete, das lndividuale, das Persönliche. Das ist die Art dieses Autors, für die er nichts kann als Anlage, die er übernimmt (...) als Aufgabe, als sein Talent im biblischen Sinne, nicht sich rühmend, nicht fordernd, daß andere auf die gleiche Weise der Wahrheit sich nähern, die über alles ist, oder von der erkannten persönlich Besitz ergreifen, wohl aber hoffend, daß manche sie und ihn verstehen werden. [Notiz zu Begin des Buches]. (shrink)

Prägender Denker für die Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften. Das Handbuch präsentiert den aktuellen Diskussionsstand zu Werk und Wirkung Theodor W. Adornos. Es beleuchtet zentrale Fragestellungen des wegweisenden Philosophen und bietet inhaltliche und methodische Werkzeuge zur Auseinandersetzung mit seinen Schriften. Über 40 Beiträger lassen die verschiedenen Zugangsweisen in der Beschäftigung mit Adorno deutlich werden. So kommt der spezifisch interdisziplinäre Charakter des Adornoschen Philosophierens hervorragend zum Ausdruck.

In 1914, on the eve of the Great War, the eminent scholar and polymath, Theodore Merz, published what would be the final volume of his magisterial history of nineteenth-century European thought. A belated review of this volume appeared in the April 1918 issue of the American Historical Review. This particular review, though favorable, was inexplicably unsigned. Our paper offers compelling evidence that the author of this unsigned review was George H. Mead, the pragmatist philosopher from the University of Chicago. (...) The paper is organized in the following fashion. First, several types of documentary evidence are cited in support of the claim that Mead authored the unsigned review. Second, content analysis is used to identify themes in the review that reflect the distinctive intellectual concerns of Mead. One such concern was the ability of research-based science to address and rectify problematic aspects of social life. The concluding section of the paper reprints in its entirety Mead’s 1918 review. (shrink)

L’oeuvre de Theodor W. Adorno, et plus particulièrement sa Théorie esthétique, témoigne de sa défense soutenue de l’art moderne. Toutefois, dans le cadre de ses réflexions, on ne doit pas oublier qu’elle comporte également une dimension critique. Sa polémique à propos du jazz, par exemple, est devenue célèbre. Par contraste, sa critique de la peinture monochrome demeure relativement inconnue. Ce texte propose d’abord d’esquisser les éléments de celle-ci afin de tester ensuite ses limites en analysant une oeuvre monochrome d’Yves (...) class='Hi'>Klein: IKB 79.Theodor W. Adorno’s defence of modern art in Aesthetic Theory and other writings is well known, as is his scathing attack on jazz. Less well known is his critique of monochromatic painting. This article first sketches the stakes and terms of this critique in relation to Clement Greenberg’s dismissal of much monochromatic or near-monochromatic painting, before moving on to an analysis of Adorno’s position. For the purposes of this analysis, Yves Klein’s IKB 79 serves as a test case. (shrink)

In this chapter I discuss the attempts by Theodor Kaluza [Kaluza, T., 1921. Zum Unitätproblem der Physik. Sitzungsber. der K. Ak. der Wiss. zu Berlin, 966–972] and by Oskar Klein [Klein, O., 1926a. Quantentheorie und fünfdimensionale Relativitätstheorie. Zeitschrift für Physik 37 (12), 895–906; Klein, O., 1926b. The atomicity of electricity as a quantum theory law. Nature 118, 516], respectively, to unify electromagnetism and general relativity within a five-dimensional Riemannian manifold. I critically compare Kaluza's results to Klein's. (...) Klein's theory possesses more explanatory power and unificatory strength and uses less types of brute facts than Kaluza's. The characteristic feature of Klein's theory is that it relies on an extrinsic element of unification, i.e. the wavefunction behavior, which is not intrinsic to EM or GR. Finally, I compare and discuss Kaluza's and Klein's theories in the context of Tim Maudlin's [Maudlin, T., 1996. On the unification of physics. Journal of Philosophy 93 (3), 129–144] ranking of unification and I clarify in what sense they constitute counterexamples to some of Margaret Morrison's [Morrison, M., 2000. Unifying Scientific Theories: Physical Concepts and Mathematical Structures. Cambridge University Press] assertions about unification. (shrink)

I examine the relation between explanation and unification in both the original Kaluza–Klein theory, which originated in the works of Theodor Kaluza and Oskar Klein in the 1920s, and in the modern Kaluza–Klein theories which date back to the late 1970s and which are still considered by the majority of the physics community to be the best hope for a complete unified theory of all fundamental interactions. I use the conclusions of this case study to assess the (...) merits of Philip Kitcher's account of explanation as unification. I also draw lessons about physicists’ pursuit of the higher dimensional unification of the fundamental forces of nature. (shrink)

Foundationalism is false; after all, foundational beliefs are arbitrary, they do not solve the epistemic regress problem, and they cannot exist withoutother (justified) beliefs. Or so some people say. In this essay, we assess some arguments based on such claims, arguments suggested in recent work by Peter Klein and Ernest Sosa.

Belnap-Dunn logic, sometimes also known as First Degree Entailment, is a four-valued propositional logic that complements the classical truth values of True and False with two non-classical truth values Neither and Both. The latter two are to account for the possibility of the available information being incomplete or providing contradictory evidence. In this paper, we present a probabilistic extension of BD that permits agents to have probabilistic beliefs about the truth and falsity of a proposition. We provide a sound and (...) complete axiomatization for the framework defined and also identify policies for conditionalization and aggregation. Concretely, we introduce four-valued equivalents of Bayes’ and Jeffrey updating and also suggest mechanisms for aggregating information from different sources. (shrink)

This book, ten years in the making, is the first factual and conceptual history of Martin Heidegger's Being and Time (1927), a key twentieth-century text whose background until now has been conspicuously absent. Through painstaking investigation of European archives and private correspondence, Theodore Kisiel provides an unbroken account of the philosopher's early development and progress toward his masterwork. Beginning with Heidegger's 1915 dissertation, Kisiel explores the philosopher's religious conversion during the bleak war years, the hermeneutic breakthrough in the war-emergency (...) semester of 1919, the evolution of attitudes toward his phenomenological mentor, Edmund Husserl, and the shifting orientations of the three drafts of Being and Time. Discussing Heidegger's little-known reading of Aristotle, as well as his last-minute turn to Kant and to existentialist terminology, Kisiel offers a wealth of narrative detail and documentary evidence that will be an invaluable factual resource for years to come. A major event for philosophers and Heidegger specialists, the publication of Kisiel's book allows us to jettison the stale view of Being and Time as a great book "frozen in time" and instead to appreciate the erratic starts, finite high points, and tentative conclusions of what remains a challenging philosophical "path.". (shrink)

Advocates of certain paraconsistent logics claim that classical logic provides incorrect norms for reasoning about impossible situations. Some have taken this claim as a sufficient reason to modify classical accounts of consequence. In this paper, I explain and evaluate such an argument based on Graham Priest's fictional story, "Sylvan's Box." I will explain and evaluate an objection to this argument based on a consistent reading of Priest's story offered by Daniel Nolan. However, I will argue that the argument fails for (...) different reasons. It is not the case that classical logic provides incorrect norms for reasoning about impossible situations. I will discuss logical tools, offered by Daniel Nolan, compatible with classical accounts of consequence that allow for non-vacuous reasoning about impossibilities. Finally, I will offer an explanation for seeming tensions between certain classical logic principles and reasoning about impossibilities. (shrink)