Wer kennt GOTTLOB FREGE (1848-1925)? Nur wenige verbinden mit seinem Namen einen der groaten Logiker aller Zeiten, ohne dessen "Logik von Funktion und Argument" die heutige Computertechnik kaum denkbar ist. Frege fuhlte sich zeitlebens zu seiner Heimat im Norden Deutschlands hingezogen. In Wismar verbrachte er seine Kindheit und in Bad Kleinen, in unmittelbarer Nahe, seinen Lebensabend. Das im Jahre 2000 gegrundete Gottlob-Frege-Zentrum der Hochschule Wismar organisierte ihm zu Ehren im Mai 2013 in seiner Geburtsstadt eine internationale Konferenz, an der Forscher (...) aus der mathematischen Grundlagenforschung und der Analytischen Philosophie teilnahmen. Im Konferenzband erfahren Sie von bekannten Wissenschaftlern u.a., begin{itemize} item was Frege zur Entwicklung der Mathematik, Logik und Philosophie leistete, item welche wissenschaftlichen Auffassungen Frege vertrat und welche er scharf kritisierte, item mit welchen bekannten Wissenschaftlern Frege korrespondierte und wer sein Werk fortsetzte oder in Frage stellte, item was wir heute noch aus Freges Arbeiten lernen konnen. (shrink)

Der protestantische Theologe Karl Girgensohn (1875–1925) ist 1903 mit seinem frühen Werk über das Wesen der Religion an die Öffentlichkeit getreten, welches einen starken religionsphilosophischen Standpunkt zum Ausdruck bringt. Kernüberlegung ist hierbei eine kognitive Theorie des Religiösen, in der die Gottesidee zentral ist. Unter Berücksichtigung der Biographie Girgensohns geht der vorliegende Beitrag auf diese frühe Studie zum Wesen der Religion ein und skizziert den Übergang des Autors von einem philosophischen zu einem experimentell-introspektiven Ansatz der Religiositätsforschung, welcher dann zum Fundament für (...) die Dorpater religionspsychologische Schule wurde. Basierend auf Girgensohns frühem Werk werden abschließend Implikationen für die heutige empirische Theologie vorgeschlagen.The Protestant theologian Karl Girgensohn (1875–1925) came to the public in 1903 with his early work on the nature of religion, which expresses a strong religious-philosophical standpoint. The core consideration here is a cognitive theory of the religious, in which the idea of God is central. Taking into account Girgensohn’s biography, the present contribution addresses this early study on the nature of religion and outlines the author’s transition from a philosophical to an experimental-introspective approach to religious research, which then became the foundation for the Dorpat School of the psychology of religion. Based on Girgensohn’s early work, implications for contemporary empirical theology are finally proposed. (shrink)

In this book Uwe Steinhoff describes and explains the basic tenets of just war theory and gives a precise, succinct and highly critical account of its present status and of the most important and controversial current debates surrounding it. Rejecting certain in effect medieval assumptions of traditional just war theory and advancing a liberal outlook, Steinhoff argues that every single individual is a legitimate authority and has under certain circumstances the right to declare war on others or the state. He (...) also argues that the just cause cannot be established independently of the other criteria of jus ad bellum (the justification of entering a war), except for right intention, which he interprets more leniently than the tradition does. Turning to jus in bello (which governs the conduct of a war) he criticizes the Doctrine of Double Effect and concludes that insofar as wars kill innocents, and be it as "collateral damage", they cannot be just but at best justified as the lesser evil. Steinhoff gives particular attention to the question why soldiers, allegedly, are legitimate targets and civilians not. Discussing four approaches to the explanation of the difference he argues that the four principles underlying them all need to be taken into account and outlines how their weighing can proceed if applied to concrete cases. The resulting approach does not square the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate targets with the distinction between soldiers and civilians, which has extremely important consequences for the conduct of war. Finally, Steinhoff analyses the concept of terrorism and argues that some forms of "terrorism" are actually not terrorism at all and that even terrorism proper can under certain circumstances be justified. (shrink)

Issues surrounding birth and death have been fundamental for Western philosophy as well as for individual existence. The contributors to this volume unravel the gendered aspects of the classical philosophical discourses on death, bringing in discussions about birth, creativity, and the entire chain of human activity. By linking their work to major thinkers such as Heidegger, Nietzsche, Beauvoir, and Arendt, and to major philosophical currents such as ancient philosophy, existentialism, phenomenology, and social and political philosophy, they challenge prevailing feminist articulations (...) of birth and death. These philosophical reflections add an important sexual dimension to current thinking on identity, temporality, and community. (shrink)

Preterm birth is defined as delivery occurring before 37 weeks gestation.1 Infants born prematurely have increased risks of morbidity and mortality throughout life, especially during the first year. These risks increase as the gestational age at birth decreases.2 Additionally, there are significant racial and ethnic differences in preterm birth rates. In 2022, the rate of preterm birth among non-Hispanic black women was approximately 50% higher than that observed in non-Hispanic white women.1 The outcomes for these infants are also disparate–preterm birth (...) and low birth weight are the second-leading causes of infant mortality (deaths before 1 year of age). Notably, among preterm neonates, infants born to non-Hispanic black women have a mortality rate more than double that of infants born to non-Hispanic white mothers.3 Importantly, there is a small but significant group of neonates that can be classified as severely premature (those born <28 weeks). Infants born before 28 weeks have varied and uncertain outcomes. While this group accounts for only 0.4% of preterm births, it also accounts for 40% of deaths among preterm neonates.4 As noted by Romanis and Adkins, the advent of artificial amnion and placenta technology (AAPT) holds promise for its potential to address the physiologic complications and mortality risks of extreme prematurity by introducing amniotic substitutes that mimic in vivo placental oxygenation and substrate delivery. In contrast …. (shrink)

For synergistic interactions between humans and artificial intelligence (AI) systems, AI outputs often need to be explainable to people. Explainable AI (XAI) systems are commonly tested in human user studies. However, whether XAI researchers consider potential cultural differences in human explanatory needs remains unexplored. We highlight psychological research that found significant differences in human explanations between many people from Western, commonly individualist countries and people from non-Western, often collectivist countries. We argue that XAI research currently overlooks these variations and that (...) many popular XAI designs implicitly and problematically assume that Western explanatory needs are shared cross-culturally. Additionally, we systematically reviewed over 200 XAI user studies and found that most studies did not consider relevant cultural variations, sampled only Western populations, but drew conclusions about human-XAI interactions more generally. We also analyzed over 30 literature reviews of XAI studies. Most reviews did not mention cultural differences in explanatory needs or flag overly broad cross-cultural extrapolations of XAI user study results. Combined, our analyses provide evidence of a cultural bias toward Western populations in XAI research, highlighting an important knowledge gap regarding how culturally diverse users may respond to widely used XAI systems that future work can and should address. (shrink)

‘No-platforming’—the practice of denying someone the opportunity to express their opinion at certain venues because of the perceived abhorrent or misguided nature of their view—is a hot topic. Several philosophers have advanced epistemic reasons for using the policy in certain cases. Here we introduce epistemic considerations against no-platforming that are relevant for the reflection on the cases at issue. We then contend that three recent epistemic arguments in favor of no-platforming fail to factor these considerations in and, as a result, (...) offer neither a conclusive justification nor strong epistemic support for no-platforming in any of the relevant cases. Moreover, we argue that, taken together, our epistemic considerations against no-platforming and the three arguments for the policy suggest that no-platforming poses an epistemic dilemma. While advocates and opponents of no-platforming alike have so far overlooked this dilemma, it should be addressed not only to prevent that actual no-platforming decisions create more epistemic harm than good, but also to put us into a better position to justify the policy when it is indeed warranted. (shrink)

Kants Konzeption der „Aufklärung“ als gemeinsamer öffentlicher Gebrauch der Vernunft wird häufig nicht nur als unhintergehbares Lehrstück der Philosophie der Aufklärung, sondern darüber hinaus als notwendiger Bestandteil freiheitlicher Gesellschaften als solcher betrachtet. Dagegen wird seltener zur Kenntnis genommen, dass in Kants Vorstellung einer „Öffentlichkeit“ diese ihre Integrität nicht allein durch die epistemischen und politischen Tugenden ihrer Teilnehmer:innen erhält, sondern letztere vor allem durch ein Gatekeeping sicherstellt. Dies führt, wie dieser Aufsatz zeigen möchte, in ein Dilemma: Auf die erwähnten Tugenden zu (...) verzichten hieße, offen politische Unruhen in Kauf zu nehmen; sie durch Gatekeeping sicherzustellen hieße, ähnlich offen den Ausschluss von Minderheiten hinzunehmen. (shrink)

Waking hallucinations suggest mechanisms of dream initiation and maintenance. Visual association cortex activation, yielding poorly attended-to, visually ambiguous dream environments, suggests conditions favoring hallucinosis. Attentional and visual systems, coactivated during sleep, may generate imagery that is inserted into virtual environments. Internally consistent dreaming may evolve from successive, contextually evoked images. Fluctuating arousal and context-evoked imagery may help explain dream features.

Does the critical discourse about resilience reiterate the problematic dichotomy between suffering and agency that the concept of resilience inscribes? In this discussion piece, I engage with Brad Evans’ and Julian Reid’s reflections on resilience. Although I share with Evans and Reid a normative critique of resilience, I am critical of their discussion of vulnerability. Rather than arguing that vulnerability precludes political transformation, as Evans and Reid do, or that vulnerability enables political coalition, as in Judith Butler’s account of precarity, (...) one should ask: how is vulnerability framed? I argue for framing vulnerability through a critical theory of the victim which explores the interconnections between injurability and agency rather than treating them as oppositional terms. (shrink)

In this article I discuss Claudia Card's treatment of war rape in relation to her discussion of the victim's moral power of forgiveness. I argue that her analysis of the victim's power to withhold forgiveness overlooks the paradoxical structure of witnessing, which implies that there is an ungraspable dimension of atrocity. In relation to this ungraspable element, the proposal that victims of atrocity have the power to either offer or withhold forgiveness may have little relevance.

Confirmation bias is one of the most widely discussed epistemically problematic cognitions, challenging reliable belief formation and the correction of inaccurate views. Given its problematic nature, it remains unclear why the bias evolved and is still with us today. To offer an explanation, several philosophers and scientists have argued that the bias is in fact adaptive. I critically discuss three recent proposals of this kind before developing a novel alternative, what I call the ‘reality-matching account’. According to the account, confirmation (...) bias evolved because it helps us influence people and social structures so that they come to match our beliefs about them. This can result in significant developmental and epistemic benefits for us and other people, ensuring that over time we don’t become epistemically disconnected from social reality but can navigate it more easily. While that might not be the only evolved function of confirmation bias, it is an important one that has so far been neglected in the theorizing on the bias. (shrink)

In the philosophy of science, it is a common proposal that values are illegitimate in science and should be counteracted whenever they drive inquiry to the confirmation of predetermined conclusions. Drawing on recent cognitive scientific research on human reasoning and confirmation bias, I argue that this view should be rejected. Advocates of it have overlooked that values that drive inquiry to the confirmation of predetermined conclusions can contribute to the reliability of scientific inquiry at the group level even when they (...) negatively affect an individual’s cognition. This casts doubt on the proposal that such values should always be illegitimate in science. It also suggests that advocates of that proposal assume a narrow, individualistic account of science that threatens to undermine their own project of ensuring reliable belief formation in science. (shrink)

In a time which it is not amiss to term “the Dark Ages of logic”, Karl Christian Friedrich Krause stayed not only true to logic but actually did something for its advancement. Besides making systematic use of Venn-diagrams long before Venn, Krause — once more taking his inspiration from Leibniz — propounded what appears to be the first completely symbolic systematic representation of logical forms, strongly suggestive of the powerful symbolic languages that have become the mainstay of logic since the (...) beginning of the 20th century. However, Krause’s limits in logic are also clearly visible: Krause’s method in logic is, in the main, not axiomatic; it is combinatorial. More importantly, Krause remained entirely within the confines of traditional syllogistics, neglecting propositional logic and, of course, first-order relational terms. (shrink)

This book is intended as a comprehensive defense of psycho-physical dualism. It gives answers to the question of what dualism may consist in, and inquires into the broadly cultural motivation behind accepting dualism or its opponent physicalism. Arguments for dualism, among them strengthened versions of the famous classical arguments, are presented and defended against objections. Moreover, the various general objections to dualism are criticized in detail, for example, the allegation that dualism is of an anti-scientific nature. The book issues into (...) developing the outlines of a dualistic theory of consciousness and agency. The theory outlined is not only compatible with science but actually connects with it. It offers a unified perspective on the phenomenon of conscious life and may serve as a basis for a general ethics regarding all conscious living beings. (shrink)

In the wake of the Supreme Court Decision, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Minkoff, Vullikanti, and Marshall (2024) argue that the unraveling of the constitutional right to abortion t...

McGowan argues “that ordinary utterances routinely enact norms without the speaker having or exercising any special authority” and thereby not “merely cause” but “constitute” harm if harm results from adherence to the enacted norms. The discovery of this “previously overlooked mechanism,” she claims, provides a potential justification for “further speech regulation.” Her argument is unsuccessful. She merely redefines concepts like “harm constitution” and “norm enactment” and fails to explain why speech that “constitutes” harm is legally or morally problematic and thus (...) an initially more plausible target for speech regulation than speech that “merely causes” harm. Even if she could explain that, however, her account would still be incapable of identifying cases where utterances “constitute harm.” This is so for two reasons. First, she provides neither analytical nor empirical criteria for deciding which so-called “s-norms” have been enacted by an “ordinary utterance.” Second, even if such criteria could be provided, there is no epistemically available means to distinguish whether harm has ensued due to adherence to the enacted s-norms or through other mechanisms. Given this lack of criteria and practical applicability, there is no way that this account could serve as a principled basis for speech regulation – it could only serve as a pretext for arbitrary censorship. (shrink)

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In the dissertation I examine the split between cognition and eros in Kant's notion of objectivity, which has become paradigmatic for modern theories about knowledge. I argue that the split between cognition, on the one hand, and feelings and desires, on the other, does not capture the necessary conditions of knowledge, as Kant claims, but involves a suppression of erotic factors of existence. ;The split between pure knowledge and sensual existence in Kant's thought reflects an ascetic tradition inherited from both (...) Greek and Christian sources, which views the body, sexuality, and in particular women's sexuality as a source of pollution. According to this tradition, since thought must be divested of the pollution of sensuous existence, women's sexuality precludes them from rational activity. Consequently, the philosophical commitment to purity has justified the exclusion of women from the practice of knowledge. ;The particular form of asceticism which is evident in Kant's treatment of sensibility of objective knowledge, of morality, and of aesthetic judgement, reflects the reified nature of relations in an emerging capitalist economy. The suppression of the immediate, sensual qualities in both the subject and object of knowledge, in Kant's system, corresponds to the suppression of the immediate, qualitative features of the subject and object in the process of commodity production. Both persons and things become reduced to a formal abstract equivalence. Kant's notion of objectivity makes normative this objectification of relations between persons and things. ;Thus, the paradigm of objective knowledge is not only damaging to the thinker, who must detach himself from the emotional and sensual facets of existence. It serves as an ideology which has justified the exclusion of women from the pursuit of knowledge, and which more generally legitimates the distorted human relations generated by the world of commodity production. ;By considering Kant's commitment to pure knowledge in the context of the genealogy of the concept of purity, the themes of asceticism and fetishism emerged as mutually illuminating. Implicit in the ascetic denial of sensuality is a dialectic which leads to an objectification of persons and things. Moreover, the fetishism of commodities involves a detachment of erotic interests from persons which results in an obsessive interest in objects. (shrink)

Answer-set programming (ASP) has emerged as a declarative programming paradigm where problems are encoded as logic programs, such that the so-called answer sets of theses programs represent the solutions of the encoded problem. The efficiency of the latest ASP solvers reached a state that makes them applicable for problems of practical importance. Consequently, problems from many different areas, including diagnosis, data integration, and graph theory, have been successfully tackled via ASP. In this work, we present such ASP-encodings for problems associated (...) to abstract argumentation frameworks (AFs) and generalisations thereof. Our encodings are formulated as fixed queries, such that the input is the only part depending on the actual AF to process. We illustrate the functioning of this approach, which is underlying a new argumentation system called ASPARTIX in detail and show its adequacy in terms of computational complexity. (shrink)

Members of the field of philosophy have, just as other people, political convictions or, as psychologists call them, ideologies. How are different ideologies distributed and perceived in the field? Using the familiar distinction between the political left and right, we surveyed an international sample of 794 subjects in philosophy. We found that survey participants clearly leaned left (75%), while right-leaning individuals (14%) and moderates (11%) were underrepresented. Moreover, and strikingly, across the political spectrum, from very left-leaning individuals and moderates to (...) very right-leaning individuals, participants reported experiencing ideological hostility in the field, occasionally even from those from their own side of the political spectrum. Finally, while about half of the subjects believed that discrimination against left- or right-leaning individuals in the field is not justified, a significant minority displayed an explicit willingness to discriminate against colleagues with the opposite ideology. Our findings are both surprising and important, because a commitment to tolerance and equality is widespread in philosophy, and there is reason to think that ideological similarity, hostility, and discrimination undermine reliable belief formation in many areas of the discipline. (shrink)

Why do feminist philosophers read Kant? Because of his misogyny and his disdain for the body, Barbara Herman has described Kant as the modern moral philosopher whom feminists find most objectionable. But that unhappy status alone would not justify a separate entry on Kant in this volume. Immanuel Kant is the figure in modern philosophy who most clearly articulates the Enlightenment program that reason is the vehicle for humanity's progress towards emancipation from unjust authority, a program that epitomizes the self‐understanding (...) of the Western culture of modernity. Kant's paradigm of objectivity, which formalizes the universal and necessary conditions for knowledge, provides a philosophical justification for the view that cognitive and moral judgments must be disinterested and impartial. This assumption about the impartiality of knowledge is deeply entrenched in academic disciplines. The quest for objectivity undergirds prevailing methodologies in the natural and social sciences as well as in philosophy. The assumption that knowledge is impartial informs the practices of daily life as well – e.g., in how one evaluates newspaper reporting or jury decisions. Feminist philosophers seek to come to terms with these features of modernity. They debate whether Enlightenment conceptions of progress and rationality offer tools for women's emancipation and empowerment, or whether this philosophical inheritance itself has contributed to the historical subordination of women in Western society. (shrink)

It has been argued that our currently most satisfactory social epistemology of science can’t account for science that is based on artificial intelligence (AI) because this social epistemology requires trust between scientists that can take full responsibility for the research tools they use, and scientists can’t take full responsibility for the AI tools they use since these systems are epistemically opaque. I think this argument overlooks that much AI-based science can be done without opaque models, and that agents can take (...) full responsibility for the systems they use even if these systems are opaque. Requiring that an agent fully understand how a system works is an untenably strong condition for that agent to take full responsibility for the system and risks absolving AI developers from responsibility for their products. AI-based science need not create trust-related social epistemological problems if we keep in mind that what makes both individual scientists and their use of AI systems trustworthy isn’t full transparency of the internal processing but their adherence to social and institutional norms that ensure that scientific claims can be trusted. (shrink)

In this essay, Robin May Schott criticizes leading proponents of just war theory and introduces the notion of justifiable but illegitimate violence. Instead of legitimating some wars as just, it is better to acknowledge that both the situation of war and moral judgments about war are ambiguous. Schott raises the questions: What are alternative narratives of war? And what are alternative narratives to war? Such narratives are necessary for addressing the concepts of evil and of witnessing in the (...) ethical discourse after Auschwitz. (shrink)

Science is atypical because it is cultivated with communal participation from throughout the world. This global formation has evolved recently. It originates in the institutionalization of a cosmopolitan tradition in Europe. The cosmopolitan orientation and the perceived usefulness of the European tradition promoted its adoption and institutionalization in the non-Western civilizations. A global institutional frame, including a global science policy regime, sustains communal participation in world science. Participation is described in terms of individual, national, and global communalformations.

It has been argued that implicit biases are operative in philosophy and lead to significant epistemic costs in the field. Philosophers working on this issue have focussed mainly on implicit gender and race biases. They have overlooked ideological bias, which targets political orientations. Psychologists have found ideological bias in their field and have argued that it has negative epistemic effects on scientific research. I relate this debate to the field of philosophy and argue that if, as some studies suggest, the (...) same bias also exists in philosophy then it will lead to hitherto unrecognised epistemic hazards in the field. Furthermore, the bias is epistemically different from the more familiar biases in respects that are important for epistemology, ethics, and metaphilosophy. (shrink)

When observers view a rapidly moving stimulus they may see only a static streak. We report that there can be a transient percept of motion if such a moving stimulus is preceded or followed by a stationary image of that stimulus. A ring of dots was rotated so rapidly observers only saw a continuous outline circle and could not report its rotation direction. When an objectively stationary ring of dots preceded or followed this rotating ring, the stationary ring appeared to (...) visibly launch into motion from a standstill or visibly rotate to a halt, principally in the same direction as the actual rapid rotation. Thus, motions too rapid to be consciously perceived as motion can nonetheless be processed by the visual system, and generate neural transition states that are consciously experienced as motion percepts. We suggest such transition states might serve a unifying function by bridging discontinuous motion states. (shrink)

Nielsen's concept of “covert REM sleep” accounts for more of the complexity in sleep psychophysiology than its conceptual predecessors such as the tonic-phasic model. With new neuroimaging findings, such concepts lead to more precise sleep psychophysiology including both traditional polysomnographic signs and neuronal activity in greater proximity to the actual point sources and distributed networks which generate dreaming. [Hobson et al.; Nielsen].

During the age of colonial expansion, European merchant companies used paper technologies as tools of control. This article analyses a set of tables produced in the 1690s by employees of the Dutch East India Company, as they recorded their daily efforts on a new method of desalinating ocean water. These printed “formulieren” should be viewed not only as a novel extension of the nautical logbook but also as an early phase in the development of questionnaires. Adapted from clerical formularies, these (...) structured tabular records are an early instance of a single-purpose data collection document, one linked with a new piece of technology, for which performance was to be measured daily. These sparse columns allow us to recover the practices of the “watermakers” themselves: some filled out the tables diligently, others gave rough estimates after the fact. Each of these men approached a supposedly standard technology in a different way, allowing us to uncover surprising individualism from within columns of numbers. (shrink)