Life's Solution builds a persuasive case for the predictability of evolutionary outcomes. The case rests on a remarkable compilation of examples of convergent evolution, in which two or more lineages have independently evolved similar structures and functions. The examples range from the aerodynamics of hovering moths and hummingbirds to the use of silk by spiders and some insects to capture prey. Going against the grain of Darwinian orthodoxy, this book is a must read for anyone grappling with the meaning of (...) evolution and our place in the Universe. Simon Conway Morris is the Ad Hominen Professor in the Earth Science Department at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St. John's College and the Royal Society. His research focuses on the study of constraints on evolution, and the historical processes that lead to the emergence of complexity, especially with respect to the construction of the major animal body parts in the Cambrian explosion. Previous books include The Crucible of Creation (Getty Center for Education in the Arts, 1999) and co-author of Solnhofen (Cambridge, 1990). Hb ISBN (2003) 0-521-82704-3. (shrink)

This book introduces generative grammar as an area of study and asks what it tells us about the human mind. Wolfram Hinzen lays the foundation for the unification of modern generative linguistics with the philosophies of mind and language. He introduces Chomsky's program of a 'minimalist' syntax as a novel explanatory vision of the human mind. He explains how the Minimalist Program originated in work in cognitive science, biology, linguistics, and philosophy, and examines its implications for work in these (...) fields. He considers the way the human mind is designed when seen as an arrangement of structural patterns in nature, and argues that its design is the product not so much of adaptive evolutionary history as of principles and processes that are ahistorical and internalist in character. Linguistic meaning, he suggests, arises in the mind as a consequence of structures emerging on formal rather than functional grounds. From this he substantiates an unexpected and deeply unfashionable notion of human nature. Clearly written in nontechnical language and assuming a limited knowledge of the fields it examines and links, Minimal Mind Design will appeal to a wide range of scholars in linguistics, philosophy, and cognitive science. It also provides an exceptionally clear insight into the nature and aims of Chomsky's Minimalist Program. (shrink)

This interdisciplinary book considers the relationship between language and thought from a philosophical perspective, drawing both on the philosophical study of language and the purely formal study of grammar, and arguing that the two should align. The claim is that grammar provides homo sapiens with the ability to think in certain grammatical ways and that this in turn explains the vast cognitive powers of human beings. Evidence is considered from biology, the evolution of language, language disorders, and linguistic phenomena.

This paper shows that our epistemological career starts at any rate earlier than Robert Brandom´s theory of inferential reason suggests. So we need a theory of informal ways of getting knowledge in the tradition of Leibniz. To do justice to the intended fragile initial oscillations of primary understanding of a meaningful world we must go back to areas before hermeneutics starts and take recourse to the repertoire of mantic vocabulary.

We present an argument against physicalism in two steps: 1) Physics reduces the world to a mathematical structure; 2) The notion of 'structure' only makes sense when carried by something and interpreted by something else. Physicalism does not allow such a carrier and interpreter at a fundamental level, hence it must be wrong. An extended notion of Mind is presented as the fundamental 'hardware' which is necessary by the argument. In particular, qualia correspond to the 'monitor component' of mind. Some (...) ideas are presented on how to extend this mind-matter relation to a more elaborate picture: (1) A system of two complementary reductionisms (one physical, the other mental) may hint toward a deeper reality in which mind and the physical world are closely entangled. (2) A division of mind into a conscious 'monitor' and an unconscious 'processor' is suggested using the analogy of dreams. Finally, the problem of Solipsism and the existence of 'minds other than my own' is discussed. (shrink)

Short description: Wie kann der Boden für eine kulturmenschliche Potenzialentfaltung politisch und gesellschaftlich fruchtbar gemacht werden?; Promotional text: Immanuel Hermann Fichtes ›System der Ethik‹ ist vor dem Hintergrund einer innenpolitischen Erstarrung als Folge der Revolution von 1848 und des in Deutschland sich nahezu gleichzeitig ereignenden wirtschaftlichen ›Take-off‹ des beginnenden Industriezeitalters verfasst. In direktem Bezug auf diese Umbruchssituation bietet Fichtes Konzeption, die Wolfram Schmitz in seiner Studie erstmals umfassend untersucht, Leitlinien für eine weitgreifende Reform von Staat und Gesellschaft.; Biographical note: (...) Dr. Wolfram Schmitz hat Philosophie, Geschichte und Soziologie studiert. (shrink)

The view that proper names are uniformly predicates has recently gained prominence. I review linguistic evidence against it. Overall, the linguistic evidence suggests that proper names function as predicates when they appear in a grammatically predicative position and as referential expressions when they are grammatically in a referential position. Conceptual grounds on which the predicativist view might nonetheless be upheld include ‘uniformity’, i.e., that a single semantic value be lexically specified for names in all of their occurrences irrespective of differences (...) in their grammar. However, ‘being a predicate’ or ‘being referential’ are not lexical properties of words but indications for how these grammatically function on an occasion of their use. Moreover, the intuitively referential and intuitively predicative uses of proper names precisely covary with grammatical differences. A proper name is therefore a predicate when it is predicatively used, not when its grammar and meaning are different. Given this grammar-meaning alignment there is no motivation to posit a novel ‘covert syntax’ for names in their referential uses, which breaks this alignment. Cross-linguistic evidence from languages such as Catalan, which features overt determiners in referential uses of proper names, moreover turns out to strongly support the view that the grammar of human language is systematically sensitive to differences in the referential and predicative uses of names. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie Jahrgang: 57 Heft: 4 Seiten: 501-520.

***Angaben zur beteiligten Person Kann: Christoph Kann ist Professor für Philosophie an der Universität Düsseldorf.

Philosophie ist wissentlicher Einhegungsversuch des Nichtwissens. Wo immer sie daher die Bedeutung und Wirksamkeit des Nichtwissens nicht präsent hält, verfehlt sie ihre Mitte. Das hat sich seit der Antike bis heute nicht geändert. Allerdings blieb es den Interessen der Zeiten und Denker vorbehalten, die Mischformen von Wissen und Nichtwissen in ihrer Eigenart mehr oder weniger eingehend zu analysieren. Selbst wenn die sokratische Formel vom Wissen des Nichtwissens durchgängig gerne zitiert wurde: Wie die Formen des Wissens in ihren schwachen, aber unentbehrlichen (...) Variationen näherhin zu charakterisieren sind, hat über die Zeiten die Philosophen eher selten interessiert. Aber diese schwachen Formen des Wissens wie Ahnung, Mutmaßung und das Gefühl als Grundlage von Situationseinschätzungen sind für unseren Alltag von erheblicher Bedeutung. Wolfram Hogrebe diskutiert in seinem Buch Formen des Wissens in ihrer szenischen Relevanz, ja das Szenische als Wissensform selbst. Ein von der Philosophie bislang völlig ignoriertes Thema. Aber die Philosophie kann gar nicht ignorieren, ohne dennoch auch in ihrem Absehen noch etwas Mitgesehenes hervortreten zu lassen. (shrink)

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A soaring intellectual narrative starring the radical, brilliant, and provocative philosophers Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, and Ayn Rand by the critically acclaimed author of Time of the Magicians, Wolfram Eilenberger The period from 1933 to 1943 was one of the darkest and most chaotic in human history, as the Second World War unfolded with unthinkable cruelty. It was also a crucial decade in the dramatic, intersecting lives of some of history's greatest philosophers. In particular, four women (...) whose parallel ideas would come to dominate the twentieth century-at once in necessary dialogue and striking contrast with one another. Simone de Beauvoir, already in a deep emotional and intellectual partnership with Jean-Paul Sartre, was laying the foundations for nothing less than the future of feminism. Born Alissa Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg before emigrating to the US in 1926, Ayn Rand was honing one of the most politically influential voices of the 20th century. Her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged would reach the hearts and minds millions of Americans in the decades to come, becoming canonical libertarian texts, which continue to echo today among Silicon Valley's tech elite. Hannah Arendt was developing some of today's most important leftwing ideas, culminating with the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism and her arrival as a peerless intellectual celebrity. Perhaps the greatest thinker of all was a classmate of de Beauvoir: Simone Weil, who turned away from fame to devote herself entirely to refugee aid and the resistance movement during the war. Ultimately, in 1943, she would starve to death in England, a martyr and true saint in the eyes of many. Few authors can synthesize gripping storytelling with sophisticated philosophy like Wolfram Eilenberger. The Visionaries tells the story of four singular philosophers-indomitable women who were refugees and resistance fighters-each putting forward a vision of a truly free and open society at a time of authoritarianism and war. (shrink)

This chapter explores some fundamental consequences of the correspondence between physical process and computations. Most physical questions may be answerable only through irreducible amounts of computation. Those that concern idealized limits of infinite time, volume, or numerical precision can require arbitrarily long computations, and so be considered formally undecidable. The behavior of a physical system may always be calculated by simulating explicitly each step in its evolution. Much of theoretical physics has, however, been concerned with devising shorter methods of calculation (...) that reproduce the outcome without tracing each step. Computational irreducibility is common among the systems investigated in mathematics and computation theory, but it may well be the exception rather than the rule, since most physical questions may be answerable only through irreducible amounts of computation. (shrink)

In this paper, the concept of liquidation from the chapter on Self-consciousness in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is reconstructed and then used to deconstruct the systematic transition from sculpture to painting in the passage on the “System of the individual arts” in G.W.F. Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. The aim is to show that such a deconstructed version of Hegel’s art philosophy provides a valid conceptual framework for the analysis of modern, particularly postmodern and contemporary art, which results as (...) liquid or liquidated art. Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God is discussed as major evidence for the concomitant neo-Hegelian claim that modern art has discursive reflection as its necessary supplement. (shrink)

Verkehrsmittel lassen sich als Medien betrachten, die auf die Wahrnehmung des Raums einwirken, aber auch als Milieus, die bestimmte Formen sozialer Interaktion erzeugen. Um beide Perspektiven aufeinander zu beziehen, umreißt der Beitrag eine Topologie der Fahrzeuge anhand von Stadttexten aus der französischen Literatur der Gegenwart. Aus deren eingehender Darstellung bestimmter Verkehrsmittel geht hervor, dass literarische Texte nicht allein fahrzeugspezifische Weisen der Raumerfahrung entziffern, sondern darüber hinaus auch in Auseinandersetzung mit einer überkommenen Transportkultur originelle Praktiken des Fahrzeuggebrauchs ersinnen. On the one (...) hand, means of transport can be considered as media which shape the perception of space; on the other, they can be considered as milieus which produce certain forms of social interaction. In order to relate both perspectives to each other, the present contribution outlines a topology of vehicles, drawing upon contemporary French literature set in cities. Their detailed representation of certain means of transport shows that literary texts not only decipher modes of spatial perception that are specific to certain vehicles, but also devise new ways of using vehicles through their involvement with an outdated culture of transport. (shrink)

Über das wesen der künstlerischen phantasie.--Über drei hymnen des Rig-Veda.--Über die bildwerke am Zeustempel von Olympia.--Mythenbildung um Alexander den Grossen.--Die anthroposophischen grundlagen des christentums.--Goethe und die goldene legende.--Die madonna der expressionisten.--Der mensch August Strindberg im spiegel seiner werke und das problem seines lebens als zeitproblem.--Das mysterium der Tristansage.