This is the basis of the first part of the book.

Kant's theory of cognition centrally builds on his conception of self‐consciousness and the transcendental use of the phrase “I think”: the ability to add the phrase “I think” to a representation is a necessary condition of the ability to cognize objects. The paper argues that “I think”, rather than denoting the content of a predicative judgement, is typically an expression of the subject's thinking. It expresses a kind of self‐consciousness that, without assertively representing the subject itself, indicates that representational contents (...) are unified in a single consciousness of a single subject. Our aim is thus to develop and defend an expressivist interpretation of Kant's “I think”. (shrink)

One of the main controversies of the Logic Schools of the 12th century centered on the question: What follows from the impossible? In this paper arguments for two diametrically opposed positions are examined. The author of the ‘Avranches Text’ who probably belonged to the school of the Parvipontani defended the view that from an impossible proposition everything follows (‘Ex impossibili quodlibet’). In particular he developed a proof to show that by means of so-called ‘disjunctive syllogism’ any arbitrary proposition B can (...) be logically derived from a pair of contradictory propositions A and Not-A. The author of the Ars Meliduna instead argued that nothing follows from an impossible proposition (‘ex falso nihil sequitur’). This view is supported by various counterexamples which aimed to show that the admission of impossible premises would give rise to inconsistent conclusions. Upon closer analysis these inconsistencies do not, however, have the formal structure of a real contradiction like A and Not-A, but rather the structure of two rivalling conditionals like ‘If B then A’ and ‘If B then Not-A’. Hence these counterexamples rather have to be considered as refutations of the basic principles of ‘connexive logic’. (shrink)

This paper attempts to develop a projectivistic understanding of chance or objective probability or partial determination. It does so by critically examining David Lewis’ philosophy of probability and his defense of Humean Supervenience, building thereupon the constructive projectivistic alternative, which will basically be a suitable reinterpretation of de Finetti’s position. Any treatment of the topic must show how it extends to natural necessity or deterministic laws or full determination in perfect parallel. The paper indicates at the end how this demand (...) can be met. (shrink)

where _x_ stands for a visible object and _y_ for a perceiving subject (the reference to a time may be neglected).¹ I take here ”character” in the sense of Kaplan (1977) as substantiated by Haas-Spohn (1995 and Chapter 14 in this book)). The point of using Kaplan’s framework is simple, but of utmost importance: It provides a scheme for clearly separating epistemological and metaphysical issues, for specifying how the two domains are related, and for connecting them to questions concerning meaning (...) where confusions are often only duplicated. All this is achieved by it better than by any alternative I know of.². (shrink)

The paper is essentially a short version Spohn "Strategic Rationality" which emphasizes in particular how the ideas developed there may be used to shed new light on the iterated prisoner's dilemma (and on iterated Newcomb's problem).

Der vorliegende Band enthalt sechs teilweise stark iiberarbeitete Aufsatze, die in der Zeit zwischen der Niederschrift des Buches Theorienstrnkturen und Theoriendynamik, Springer-Verlag 1973, im folgenden mit [Theoriendynamik] bezeichnet, und der Monographie The Strncturalist View of Theories. A Pos­ sible Analogue of the Bourbaki Programme in Physical Science, Springer-Ver­ lag 1979, im folgenden kurz [Strnkturalismus] genannt, entstanden sind. In diesen Abhandlungen werden jeweils gewisse Aspekte des strukturalistischen Theorienkonzeptes behandelt. Am starksten iiberarbeitet wurden die Auf­ satze II, IV, V und VI, die (...) urspriinglich in englischer Sprache erschienen waren. Vier der sechs Arbeiten, namlich I, III, IV und VI, bilden auBerdem erweiterte Fassungen von Vortragen. Obwohl das zweite Buch [Strnkturalismus] durch P. Feyerabends ausftihr­ liche Diskussion der strukturalistischen Auffassung im British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Dezember 1977, angeregt worden ist, stellt es seinem Ansatz und Aufbau nach eher den Versuch einer systematischen Kurzdarstel­ lung des strukturalistischen Vorgehens nach seinem letzten Stande dar. Dem­ gegeniiber entstanden die hier verOffentlichten Artikel stets aus einem ganz be­ stimmten AnlaB. Diese Anlasse konnte man schematisch in drei Klassen unter­ teilen: Entweder ging es darum, eine anschauliche intuitive Ein/iihrnng zu lie­ fern (I und V); oder die Aufgabe bestand darin, die Beziehung zu anderen philosophischen Positionen. wie z. B. derjenigen L. Wittgensteins, H. Putnams, K. Poppers oder T. S. Kuhns. zu analysieren (II. III und IV); oder es sollte zu den wichtigsten und bis dahin verOffentlichten Kritiken Stellung bezogen wer­ den (wie in VI). (shrink)

What is an image? An image, it might be said, is a kind of amity between the medium and the model it assumes. The purpose of this relationship is to reproduce the model and to become similar to it. Such a definition invites – perhaps in a purely playful way – some preliminary considerations.

The intervention of the divine in human history, more precisely the transition from fiction to incarnation that is peculiar to the origins of Christianity, marks a turning-point in our understanding of the genealogical principle. With a Son of Man who is also Son of God and his Mother's Father, there is no paternity and, more generally, no genealogy that is not reversible. To this questioning of elementary kinship structures we should add the contesting of the hitherto accepted distribution of genders (...) and sexes. The superimposition of the Holy Family and the Trinity created an uncertain sex whose effect is to uncouple sex from its functions, in particular procreation. Hence a circulation and instability of sex. It is from this viewpoint that we should see the notion of an androgynous Christ and the Church Fathers' thinking on the resurrected body. (shrink)

The respectably legitimate offspring of an age-old affair between writing and picture-making, the calligramme — that is, “a poem in which the typographical layout creates a picture, generally related to the ‘subject’ of the text” (Dictionnaire des littératures, Larousse) — is often seen as an esoteric minority art of dubious reputation. Starting from an exclusively Western approach to the history of the calligramme, my aim is to demonstrate that this artform may in fact represent something more than simply (here I (...) deliberately use a metaphor from the far east, as a counterargument to my theme) the “Kyogen of the No theatre” — i.e., more than a lightweight interlude between more literary, aesthetic, even metaphysical preoccupations — more elevated, more serious, or, in general terms, more extended. Apart from the play and the pleasure of an approach that is creative in terms of letters and language, it contains serious elements related to the actual exercise of writing in our media civilization. (shrink)

Aristoteles hat seine Lehrschriften sicherlich sowohl als Vorlesungsmanuskripte für seine Schüler als auch für ein abstraktes Publikum und für die Nachwelt geschrieben. Denn wir finden sowohl Bezugnahmen auf seine Hörer als auch Bemerkungen, die einzelne seiner Thesen selbstbewusst im positiven Sinne mit der Leistung der Vorgänger vergleichen und in einen historischen Zusammenhang stellen, was nur sinnvoll ist, wenn der Vergleich von außen nachvollzogen warden konnte. Wieweit einzelne Schriften zu seinen Lebzeiten in Umlauf kamen, ist unbekannt.

Rudolf Carnap was born on May 18, 1891, and Hans Reichenbach on September 26 in the same year. They are two of the greatest philosophers of this century, and they are eminent representatives of what is perhaps the most powerful contemporary philosophical movement. Moreover, they founded the journal Erkenntnis. This is ample reason for presenting, on behalf of Erkenntnis, a collection of essays in honor of them and their philosophical work. I am less sure, however, whether it is a good (...) time for resuming their philosophical impact; their work still is rather part than historical basis of the present philosophical melting-pot. Their basic philosophical theses have currently, it may seem, not so high a standing, but their impact can be seen in numerous detailed issues; they have opened or pushed forward lively fields of research which are still very actively pursued not only within philosophy, but also in many neighboring disciplines. Whatever the present balance of opinions about their philosophical ideas, there is something even more basic in their philosophy than their tenets which is as fresh, as stimulating, as exemplary as ever. I have in mind their way of philosophizing, their conception of how to do philosophy. It is always a good time for reinforcing that conception; and if this volume would manage to do so, it would fully serve its purpose. (shrink)

I defend a general rule for updating beliefs that takes into account both the impact of new evidence and changes in the subject’s location. The rule combines standard conditioning with a shifting operation that moves the center of each doxastic possibility forward to the next point where information arrives. I show that well-known arguments for conditioning lead to this combination when centered information is taken into account. I also discuss how my proposal relates to other recent proposals, what results it (...) delivers for puzzles like the Sleeping Beauty problem, and whether there are diachronic constraints on rational belief at all. (shrink)

We define classes Φnof formulae of first-order arithmetic with the following properties:(i) Everyφϵ Φnis classically equivalent to a Πn-formula (n≠ 1, Φ1:= Σ1).(ii)(iii)IΠnandiΦn(i.e., Heyting arithmetic with induction schema restricted to Φn-formulae) prove the same Π2-formulae.We further generalize a result by Visser and Wehmeier. namely that prenex induction within intuitionistic arithmetic is rather weak: After closing Φnboth under existential and universal quantification (we call these classes Θn) the corresponding theoriesiΘnstill prove the same Π2-formulae. In a second part we consideriΔ0plus collection-principles. We (...) show that both the provably recursive functions and the provably total functions ofare polynomially bounded. Furthermore we show that the contrapositive of the collection-schema gives rise to instances of the law of excluded middle and hence. (shrink)

This thought-provoking volume of essays, wide-ranging in scope and interdisciplinary in its approach, engages with questions surrounding the many meanings ascribed to death and the memorialisation of the dead. In its eight essays, it traverses whole thought-continents: from those who muse that "death has happened since the beginning of time; it is not to upset you today" to the stark presentation of a reality which erodes the human face and thus a person's individuality. What clearly emerges are the many respects (...) in which death itself has been and, indeed, remains, contested ground (both literally and metaphorically). This collection is an important contribution to the ever-expanding field of studies on Death and Dying." - Salvador Ryan - ed., Death and the Irish: a Miscellany (Dublin: Wordwell Books, 2016). (shrink)

This article discusses the history of the concepts of potential infinity and actual infinity in the context of Christian theology, mathematical thinking and metaphysical reasoning. It shows that the structure of Ancient Greek rationality could not go beyond the concept of potential infinity, which is highlighted in Aristotle's metaphysics. The limitations of the metaphysical mind of ancient Greece were overcome through Christian theology and its concept of the infinite God, as formulated in Gregory of Nyssa's theology. That is how the (...) concept of actual infinity emerged. However, Gregory of Nyssa's understanding of human rationality went still further. He said that access to the infinity of God was to be found only in an asymptotic ascension, as expressed in apophatic theology, and this view endangered the rationality of theology. Deeply influenced by the apophatic tradition, Nicholas of Cusa avoided this danger by showing that infinity could be accessed by symbolic representation and asymptotic mathematical reasoning. Thus, he made an immense contribution in making infinity rationally accessible. This endeavor was finally realized by Georg Cantor. This rational accessibility revealed discernible structures of infinity, such as the continuum hypothesis, and the cardinal numbers. However, the probable logical inconsistency of Georg Cantor's all-encompassing Absolute Infinity points to an intuitive understanding of infinity that goes beyond its rational structures – as in apophatic theology. (shrink)

Die Hypothese meines Beitrags ist, dass Interpretationen fiktionaler Romane zum Teil rationale Erklärungen der emotionalen Zustände fiktiver Romanfiguren sein sollten. Der Hintergrund dieser Hypothese ist zum einen die generelle Definition von Interpretationen als rationalen Erklärungen und zum anderen die neue Theorie der affektiven Intentionalität von Gefühlen (eine Variante der kognitiven Gefühlstheorie). Diese Theorie unterscheidet mehrere Komponenten von Gefühlen und weist nach, dass eine überwiegend rationale Vernetzung dieser Komponenten eine notwendige Bedingung für ihre Interpretation ist (Abschnitt 1). Dieser methodische Zugriff lässt (...) sich an geeigneten Romanen testen und verifizieren, beispielsweise an Flauberts 'Madame Bovary' – einer fiktionalen Geschichte, die sich als eine einzige komplexe und verkettete rationale Erklärung der suizidalen Verzweiflung Emmas deuten lässt. Das bedeutet allerdings nicht, dass eine solche rationale Erklärung die Interpretation fiktionaler Romane ausschöpft. Vielmehr lassen sich fünf verschiedene, ineinandergreifende Stufen von Romaninterpretationen unterscheiden (Abschnitt 2). Gerade wenn Literaturinterpretationen eine komplexe Form annehmen, wird das bekannte Paradox virulent, dass wir uns bemüßigt fühlen, komplexe Interpretationen der Emotionen und Handlungen von Figuren zu liefern, die nicht existieren. In neueren Arbeiten zeichnet sich eine primär psychologische Lösung dieses Paradoxes ab. Zu dieser Lösung gehört der Befund, dass das Bemühen um rationale Erklärungen fiktiver Figuren unsere Fähigkeit, reale Personen in unserem sozialen Umfeld, aber auch in fremden Kulturen angemessen zu interpretieren, in erstaunlichem Ausmaß fördert. (shrink)

First published in 1986 and reprinted in 2010 in the Routledge Revivals series, this book presents the first detailed confrontation between the Austrian school of economics and Austrian philosophy, especially the philosophy of the Brentano school. It contains a study of the roots of Austrian economics in the liberal political theory of the nineteenth-century Hapsburg empire, and a study of the relations between the general theory of value underlying Austrian economics and the new economic approach to human behaviour propounded by (...) Gary Becker and others in Chicago. In addition, it considers the connections between Austrian methodology and contemporary debates in the philosophy of the social sciences. (shrink)

This paper compares the epistemological conception of Isaac Levi with mine. We are joined in both giving a constructive answer to the relation of belief and probability, without reducing one to the other. However, our constructions differ in at least nine more or less important ways, all discussed in the paper. In particular, the paper explains the similarities and differences of Shackle's functions of potential surprise, as used by Levi, and my ranking functions in formal as well as in philosophical (...) respects. The appendix explains how ranking and probability theory can be combined in the notion of a ranked probability measure (or probabilified ranking function). (shrink)

The core idea of the ontological proof is to show that the concept of existence is somehow contained in the concept of God, and that therefore God’s existence can be logically derived—without any further assumptions about the external world—from the very idea, or definition, of God. Now, G.W. Leibniz has argued repeatedly that the traditional versions of the ontological proof are not fully conclusive, because they rest on the tacit assumption that the concept of God is possible, i.e. free from (...) contradiction. A complete proof will rather have to consist of two parts. First, a proof of premiseGod is possible. Second, a demonstration of the “remarkable proposition”If God is possible, then God exists. The present contribution investigates an interesting paper in which Leibniz tries to prove proposition. It will be argued that the underlying idea of God as a necessary being has to be interpreted with the help of a distinguished predicate letter ‘E’ as follows:\\). Proposition which Leibniz considered as “the best fruit of the entire logic” can then be formalized as follows:\) \rightarrow \, E)\). At first sight, Leibniz’s proof appears to be formally correct; but a closer examination reveals an ambiguity in his use of the modal notions. According to, the possibility of the necessary being has to be understood in the sense of something which possibly exists. However, in other places of his proof, Leibniz interprets the assumption that the necessary being is impossible in the diverging sense of something which involves a contradiction. Furthermore, Leibniz believes that an »impossible thing«, y, is such that contradictory propositions like \\) and \\) might both be true of y. It will be argued that the latter assumption is incompatible with Leibniz’s general views about logic and that the crucial proof is better reinterpreted as dealing with the necessity, possibility, and impossibility of concepts rather than of objects. In this case, the counterpart of turns out to be a theorem of Leibniz’s second order logic of concepts; but in order to obtain a full demonstration of the existence of God, the counterpart of, i.e. the self-consistency of the concept of a necessary being, remains to be proven. (shrink)

Concentrating on Weber's engagement with political issues and their influence over his more theoretical concepts, Mommsen offers a critical analysis of Weber's notion of democracy, distinguishing its liberal and elitist features.

The subject of this paper is a characterization of the $\Sigma_1$ -definable set functions of Kripke-Platek set theory with infinity and a uniform version of axiom of choice: $KP\omega+(uniform\;AC)$ . This class of functions is shown to coincide with the collection of set functionals of type 1 primitive recursive in a given choice functional and $x\mapsto\omega$ . This goal is achieved by a Gödel Dialectica-style functional interpretation of $KP\omega+(uniform\;AC)$ and a computability proof for the involved functionals.

As the paper explains, it is crucial to epistemology in general and to the theory of causation in particular to investigate the properties of conditional independence as completely as possible. The paper summarizes the most important results concerning conditional independence with respect to two important representations of epistemic states, namely (strictly positive) probability measures and natural conditional (or disbelief or ranking) functions. It finally adds some new observations.

In 1932, Wolfgang Pauli was a world-renowned physicist and had already done the work that would win him the 1945 Nobel Prize. He was also in pain. His mother had poisoned herself after his father's involvement in an affair. Emerging from a brief marriage with a cabaret performer, Pauli drank heavily, quarreled frequently and sometimes publicly, and was disturbed by powerful dreams. He turned for help to C. G. Jung, setting a standing appointment for Mondays at noon. Thus bloomed (...) an extraordinary intellectual conjunction not just between a physicist and a psychologist but between physics and psychology. Eighty letters, written over twenty-six years, record that friendship. This artful translation presents them in English for the first time. Though Jung never analyzed Pauli formally, he interpreted more than 400 of his dreams--work that bore fruit later in Psychology and Alchemy and The Analysis of Dreams. As their acquaintance developed, Jung and Pauli exchanged views on the content of their work and the ideas of the day. They discussed the nature of dreams and their relation to reality, finding surprising common ground between depth psychology and quantum physics. Their collaboration resulted in the combined publication of Jung's treatise on synchronicity and Pauli's essay on archetypal ideas influencing Kepler's writings in The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche. Over time, their correspondence shaped and reshaped their understanding of the principle they called synchronicity, a term Jung had suggested earlier. Through the association of these two pioneering thinkers, developments in physics profoundly influenced the evolution of Jungian psychology. And many of Jung's abiding themes shaped how Pauli--and, through him, other physicists--understood the physical world. Of clear appeal to historians of science and anyone investigating the life and work of Pauli or Jung, this portrait of an incredible friendship will also draw readers interested in human creativity as well as those who merely like to be present when great minds meet. (shrink)

The paper proposes two principles of coherence (thus taking up work started in Spohn (1991) "A Reason for Explanation: Explanations Provide Stable Reasons"). The latter indeed serves as a weak, but precise explication of the notion of coherence as it is used in the current epistemological discussion. After discussing their epistemological setting, the paper considers four ways of establishing these principles. They may be inferred neither from enumerative induction, nor from the nature of propositions as objects of belief, nor in (...) a Kantian way from self-consciousness. Rather, I propose a fairly rigorous way to infer them from an even more fundamental rationality principle of non-dogmatism and an elementary theory of perception. (shrink)