In the so-called “international credit market crisis,” which started in the second half of 2007 in the US subprime mortgage market, financial derivatives, most notably credit default swaps (CDS), have been publically blamed for having caused, or at least aggravated, the economic and monetary debacle. However, sound economic [...].

„Rechtsgefühl“ kann das individuelle Gerechtigkeitsempfinden, das Judiz der Richterin im Entscheidungsfindungsprozess, das emotionale Aufbäumen der unterlegenen Partei nach der Entscheidung, eine kollektive Rechtsüberzeugung bezeichnen. Verweise auf das „Rechtsgefühl“ werden oft genutzt, um Rechtssysteme oder einzelne Rechtsakte von innen oder von außen zu legitimieren oder zu delegitimieren. Als sozialer Kompass und normative Rechtfertigung versagt „Rechtsgefühl“ dagegen, wenn es mit zahlreichen gegenläufigen Rechtsgefühlen konkurriert. Dieser Frage nach dem Stellenwert divergierender Rechts- und Gerechtigkeitsempfindungen gehen die in diesem Band versammelten Beiträge aus praktischer, theoretischer (...) und historischer Perspektive nach. Mit Beiträgen von Prof. Dr. Gabriele Britz, Prof. Dr. Jeanne Gaakeer, Prof. Dr. Thorsten Keiser, Prof. Dr. Sylvia Kesper-Biermann, Prof. Dr. Frans-Willem Korsten, Prof. Dr. Greta Olson und Prof. Dr. Franz Reimer. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop a syntactic framework for the analysis ofstrategic form games that is based on a straightforward combination ofstandard systems of doxastic, probabilistic and conditionalpropositional logic. In particular, for the probabilistic part I makeuse of the axiomatization provided in Fagin and Halpern (1994). The use ofconditionals allows to represent a strategic form game by a logicalformula in a very natural way. Also expected utility maximization can benaturally captured. I use this framework to prove a version of a (...) resulton Nash equilibrium conjectures first presented in Aumann and Brandenburger (1995). (shrink)

Columella’s work De re rustica, written in the first century A. D., is the most comprehensive treatise on agriculture extant from Graeco-Roman antiquity. An important part of his work is the treatment of animals, ranging from larger ones such as oxen, cows, horses and mules (dealt with in Book 6) to smaller ones such as sheep, goats, swine and dogs (discussed in Book 7). He devotes special sections to various types of birds, in particular chickens, and to fishes (Book 8) (...) as well as wild animals and bees (Book 9). The aim of this article is to analyse the roles and functions of animals for the ideal farmer (perfectus agricola) as outlined by Columella. While economic concerns are indeed important to him, he also takes into account numerous other aspects such as the emotional dimension between animal and farmer. The paper further highlights instances in the text where the author attributes a certain aesthetic value to animals. The final section attempts a brief comparison with Varro’s De re rustica. (shrink)

This article is mainly concerned with Statius' Silvae 3. 5, addressed to his wife Claudia. It intends to demonstrate how exemplarity and praise, features familiar from other Silvae, are intertwined in this poem with the question of gender roles. At the same time, it will be argued that the praise of other people as well as of places in this poem is closely connected with the persona of the author and that it amounts to a proud portrayal of himself and (...) his art. Statius' Silvae 3. 5 will then be compared briefly, first, with Silvae 2. 7, a genethliacon written to honour the deceased poet Lucan and his wife Polla; second, with some of Ovid's poems from exile that are addressed to his wife and to the poetess Perilla ; and third, with a letter by Pliny the Younger concerning his wife Calpurnia and her virtues. (shrink)

In vision research metacontrast masking is a widely used technique to reduce the visibility of a stimulus. Typically, studies attempt to reveal general principles that apply to a large majority of participants and tend to omit possible individual differences. The neural plasticity of the visual system, however, entails the potential capability for individual differences in the way observers perform perceptual tasks. We report a case of perceptual learning in a metacontrast masking task that leads to the enhancement of two types (...) of adult human observers despite identical learning conditions. In a priming task both types of observers exhibited the same priming effects, which were insensitive to learning. Findings suggest that visual processing of target stimuli in the metacontrast masking task is based on neural levels with sufficient plasticity to enable the development of two types of observers, which do not contribute to processing of target stimuli in the priming task. (shrink)

The problem of finding sufficient doxastic conditions for backward induction in games of perfect information is analyzed in a syntactic framework with subjunctive conditionals. This allows to describe the structure of the game by a logical formula and consequently to treat beliefs about this structure in the same way as beliefs about rationality. A backward induction and a non-Nash equilibrium result based on higher level belief in rationality and the structure of the game are derived.

This paper offers a detailed reconstruction of Frege’s theory of side-thoughts and its relation to other parts of his pragmatics, most notably to the notion of colouring, to the notion of presupposition, and to his implicit notion of multi-propositionality. I also highlight some important differences between the subsemantic categories employed by Frege and those used in contemporary pragmatics.

A syntactic formalism for the modeling of belief revision in perfect information games is presented that allows to define the rationality of a player's choice of moves relative to the beliefs he holds as his respective decision nodes have been reached. In this setting, true common belief in the structure of the game and rationality held before the start of the game does not imply that backward induction will be played. To derive backward induction, a “forward belief” condition is formulated (...) in terms of revised rather than initial beliefs. Alternative notions of rationality as well as the use of knowledge instead of belief are also studied within this framework. Footnotes1 I would like to thank Wlodek Rabinowicz and three anonymous referees for very helpful comments. (shrink)

Uncovering an aspect of Gottlob Frege's linguistic theorizing that has until now received little attention, this volume offers the first detailed exposition of Frege's pragmatics. Thorsten Sander explores his views on colouring, side-thoughts, presuppositions, indexicals and illocutionary force and closely relates these to current research in philosophy of language and linguistics. Throughout his career, Frege was concerned with various secondary aspects of meaning. He claims, for instance, that the two words 'dog' and 'cur' differ not in what he calls (...) sense, but merely in colouring. By contrast, the difference between 'morning star' and 'evening star' is supposed to be a matter of sense. How exactly does sense differ from colouring? Frege also claims that by using a proper name one presupposes the existence of its bearer and that our utterances are frequently associated with side-thoughts. What exactly does he mean by these terms, and wherein lies the difference between these phenomena? Frege's Pragmatics answers questions such as these, providing a fresh perspective on Frege's account of various pragmatic aspects of language. In this first book-length treatment, Sandor makes the case that Frege's groundbreaking ideas are an essential part of his overall philosophical enterprise. (shrink)

This paper is partly exegetical, partly systematic. I argue that Frege's account of what he called “colouring” contains some important insights on how communication is related to mental states such as mental images or emotions. I also show that the Fregean perspective is supported by current research in psycholinguistics and that a full understanding of some linguistic phenomena that scholars have accounted for in terms of either semantics or pragmatics need involve psycholinguistic elements.

Many scholars claim that Frege's theory of colouring is committed to a radical form of subjectivism or emotivism. Some other scholars claim that Frege's concept of colouring is a precursor to Grice's notion of conventional implicature. I argue that both of these claims are mistaken. Finally, I propose a taxonomy of Fregean colourings: for Frege, there are purely aesthetic colourings, communicative colourings or hints, non-communicative colourings.

Neuerdings ist dem Begriff der Langeweile viel philosophische Aufmerksamkeit gewidmet worden. Dieser Beitrag zeigt, wie stringent sich seine anthropologischen, ontologischen und theologischen Implikationen nachzeichnen lassen, wenn man von dem wohlbekannten Augustinus-Diktum ausgeht, ruhelos sei unser Herz, bis dass es ruhe in Gott. Das menschliche Personsein wird hier aufgrund der Erbsünde als unzufrieden oder auch gelangweilt dargestellt, und diese Darstellung radikalisiert sich durch die späteren Theorien der acedia als Unzufriedenheit oder Langeweile angesichts des bonum divinum selbst. Die neuzeitliche philosophische Rede von (...) ennui, Langeweile usw. übernimmt die wesentlichen Implikationen von inquietudo cordis und acedia auch dort, wo sie diese am entschiedensten verkehrt - mit Pascal beginnend über den deutschen Idealismus bis zur Quasi-Gnosis von Cioran und Heideggers Versuch, das Herz des Menschen als auf dessen endgültige Ruhe im „letzten Gott" hin ausgerichtet zu verstehen. In the past decades, the concept of boredom has been attracting much philosophical attention. The aim of this article is to show how concisely a summary of its anthropological, ontological and theological implications can be drawn if one starts from the famous phrase in St. Augustine's "Confessions" that our heart is restless until it rests in God. Human personal being is conceived of here as dissatisfied or bored because of the original sin, and this conception sees its radicalization in the theory of the acedia as a being dissatisfied or bored by the bonum divinum itself. The modern philosophical discourse on ennui, Langeweile and the like inherits very truly the basic implications of inquietudo cordis and acedia even where they are the most decisively inverted, as is shown beginning with Pascal, across the very centre of German Idealist philosophy, until Cioran's quasi-Gnostic turn and Heidegger's attempt to understand the heart of man as directed towards its ultimate rest in the "last God". (shrink)

What, exactly, is the difference between words such as ‘dead’ and ‘deceased’? In this paper, I argue that such differences in register, or style, ought to be construed as genuine differences in non-truth-conditional meaning. I also show that register cannot plausibly accounted for in terms of either presupposition or conventional implicature. Register is, rather, an instance of what I call pure use-conditional meaning. In the case of register, a difference in meaning does not correspond to a difference in the contents (...) speakers intend to convey. (shrink)

The author argues that there is no such thing as a unique and general taxonomy of non-at-issue contents. Accordingly, we ought to shun large categories such as “conventional implicature”, “F-implicature”, “CI”, “Class B” or the like. As an alternative, we may, first, describe the “semantic profile” of linguistic devices as accurately as possible. Second, we may explicitly tailor our categories to particular theoretical purposes.

Why did Frege offer only proper names as examples of presupposition triggers? Some scholars claim that Frege simply did not care about the full range of presuppositional phenomena. This paper argues, in contrast, that he had good reasons for employing an extremely narrow notion of ‘Voraussetzung’. On Frege’s view, many devices that are now construed as presupposition triggers either express several thoughts at once or merely ‘illuminate’ a thought in a particular way. Fregean presuppositions, in contrast, are essentially tied to (...) names. (shrink)

In metacontrast masking target visibility is modulated by the time until a masking stimulus appears. The effect of this temporal delay differs across participants in such a way that individual human observers’ performance shows distinguishable types of masking functions which remain largely unchanged for months. Here we examined whether individual differences in masking functions depend on different response criteria in addition to differences in discrimination sensitivity. To this end we reanalyzed previously published data and conducted a new experiment for further (...) data analyses. Our analyses demonstrate that a distinction of masking functions based on the type of masking stimulus is superior to a distinction based on the target–mask congruency. Individually different masking functions are based on individual differences in discrimination sensitivities and in response criteria. Results suggest that individual differences in metacontrast masking result from individually different criterion contents. (shrink)

Frege’s Begriffsschrift account of modality involves both a negative and a positive claim. The negative claim is that modal notions are logically insignificant; the positive claim is that modals convey a ‘hint’ (Wink) as to the speaker’s grounds for judgement. This paper is about Frege’s positive claim, which has not received much attention. I explain in detail the Fregean notion of hinting and how to distinguish hints from conceptual contents, and I argue that Frege’s two-dimensional account of modal talk is (...) supported by various observations. However, it also seems clear that Frege’s account cannot be the whole story. (shrink)

“Prizeworthy Research?” Wilhelm Roux and His Program of Developmental Mechanics. The Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine is awarded annually to a maximum of three laureates. Not surprisingly, the number of nominees is much larger. Drawing on Nobel Prize nominations in the Nobel archives in Sweden, the core of this paper deals with the nomination letters for the physiologist Wilhelm Roux to discuss competition and some controversies among German physiologists around 1900 in this particular context. The paper elucidates the arguments (...) brought forward to portray Roux as a scientist who had conferred “the greatest benefit to mankind” in the field of physiology or medicine ; examines some other runners-up, and reconstructs why Roux as well as some of his peers were not awarded the Nobel Prize. On a more general level, we argue that an analysis of Nobel Prize nominations contributes to a broader history of excellence in science and medicine in the twentieth century. (shrink)

Against the backround of Tomasello’s theory of the origins of human communication, Herder’s theory of the origin of human language might appear as a curiosity. In this paper I want to show that appearances are deceiving and that Herder’s thoughts are useful and can be integrated in Tomasello’s approach to bridge a gap in his theory.

Die Frage nach dem Menschen ist heute – im Zeitalter der zunehmenden Verschmelzung von Mensch und Technik, der Genom-Editierung und der fortgeschrittenen Naturalisierung des Menschenbildes – aktueller denn je. Der Autor präsentiert hier erstmals eine systematische und prägnante Darstellung der Idee einer neuen Anthropologie, welche die mundanen, transzendentalen und transphänomenalen Aspekte des Menschseins gleichermaßen berücksichtigt und die Reduktion des Menschen auf seinen biologischen Körper zurückweist. Diese ‚Fundamentalanthropologie‘ genannte Disziplin versteht sich als philosophische Grundlagendisziplin und als Herzstück der Philosophie als allgemeiner (...) Anthropologie. Außerdem werden in diesem Band zentrale und aktuelle philosophische Themen wie Selbstbewusstsein, Identität des Ich, das Wesen des menschlichen Geistes sowie die Zukunft des Menschen erstmals zum Gegenstand fundamentalanthropologischer Analysen gemacht. (shrink)