Although Lorenz Oken is a classic example of Naturphilosophie as applied to biology, his views have been imperfectly understood. He is best viewed as a follower of Schelling who consistently attempted to apply Schelling's ideas to biological data. His version of Naturphilosophie, however, was strongly influenced by older pseudoscience traditions, especially alchemy and numerology as they had been presented by Robert Fludd, whose works were current in Jena and available to him. According to those influences, parts of Oken's philosophical (...) conception were communicable even in a non-idealistic scientific culture, for example in Paris, where Oken met Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Geoffroy however was embedded in a French intellectual tradition, and the correspondence between his views and those of Oken was only superficial. The English anatomist Richard Owen attempted to incorporate the views of Oken and Geoffroy within his own, idiosyncratic system. Although Darwin knew of Oken's ideas, it was Geoffroy who really affected his evolutionary biology, and any influence of Oken must have been attenuated to the point of triviality. (shrink)

The paper focuses on the work of Lorenz Oken in an attempt to make sense of the role played by RomanticNaturphilosophiein the development of natural history in Germany at the turn of the nineteenth century. It first focuses on the role played by Schelling and his Würzburg circle in the development of Oken's early views on natural history, then reconstructs Oken's mature programme for a reform of animal classification.

Isis oder Encyklopädische Zeitung, edited by the German natural philosopher Lorenz Oken (1779‐1851), is supposed to be one of the most significant journals of natural sciences in the early 19th century. The following study, based on a quantitative analyses of all articles (1817‐1822), investigates the profile of the natural sciences in this journal. The results are interpreted according to Oken's concept of the journal as well as his editorial notes. It is shown that the encyclopedically broadly designed journal focuses (...) on the natural sciences as major part of it's content, presenting the descriptive history of natural sciences (Naturgeschichte) as main subject. The journal's research perspective follows the encyclopedical spread of issues and scientific subjects; a clear research profile of scientific disciplines can not be discerned. Although scientific subjects, issues and authors are heterogeneous, Oken preserves an inner coherence by a common perspective founded in natural philosophy: his strategy was therefore to interfere with the content of the articles by comments and footnotes. Finally it is shown that Oken's idea of encyclopedism and it's realisation in Isis comprises sciences as well as politics as two sides of the same coin: based on the philosophical understanding of the unity of nature Oken tries to educate the consciousness of his readers towards a socially and politically homogeneous nation. (shrink)

La« théorie cellulaire», élaborée au XIXe siècle sous l'impulsion, entre autres chercheurs, de Lorenz Oken, Matthias Schleiden, Theodor Schwann et Rudolf Virchow, a profondément modifié la vision que l'Homme se faisait jusque-là de la vie, puisqu'elle affirmait que la cellule est l'unité organique constitutive de tous les êtres vivants et que tout être vivant est issu d'une cellule. L'observation d'un unicellulaire comme la paramécie montre, en effet, qu'une cellule doit être considérée comme une forme vivante intégrale puisqu'en se nourrissant, (...) en se développant, en se défendant et en se reproduisant elle manifeste le destin commun à tous les êtres vivants. Son espace vital, engendré par ses déplacements, est coextensif à ses besoins et donc à ses comportements. (shrink)

Hendrik Lorenz presents a comprehensive study of Plato's and Aristotle's conceptions of non-rational desire. They see this as something that humans share with animals, and which aims primarily at the pleasures of food, drink, and sex. Lorenz explores the cognitive resources that both philosophers make available for the explanation of such desires, and what they take rationality to add to the motivational structure of human beings. In doing so, he finds conceptions of the mind that are coherent and (...) deeply integrated with both philosophers' views about such topics as the relation between body and soul, or the nature of the virtues. (shrink)

"Dialogisches Handeln" ist eine Sammlung von philosophischen BeitrAgen zum dialogischen Konstruktivismus im Sinne von Kuno Lorenz, der Philosophie als eine Kommunikation mit Selbstreflexion versteht. Dabei umfaAt der Dialog in diesem Buch verschiedene Disziplinen der Philosophie - von der Anthropologie A1/4ber die Grundlagen von Logik und Sprachphilosophie bis hin zur Wissenschafts- und Erkenntnistheorie. Die Reflexion auf die kommunikativen Grundlagen wissenschaftlichen Austauschs schlieAt dabei Denkperspektiven verschiedener Wissenschaften - von der Psychologie bis zu Physik und Chemie - ebenso ein wie die philosophischen (...) Disziplinen. (shrink)

What are the relationships between philosophy and the history of philosophy, the history of science and the philosophy of science? This selection of essays by Lorenz Krüger (1932-1994) presents exemplary studies on the philosophy of John Locke and Immanuel Kant, on the history of physics and on the scope and limitations of scientific explanation, and a realistic understanding of science and truth. In his treatment of leading currents in 20th century philosophy, Krüger presents new and original arguments for a (...) deeper understanding of the continuity and dynamics of the development of scientific theory. These result in significant consequences for the claim of the sciences that they understand reality in a rational manner. The case studies are complemented by fundamental thoughts on the relationship between philosophy, science, and their common history. (shrink)

Hugely controversial on publication, this is an insightful and characteristically entertaining survey of animal behaviour and the evolution of aggression throughout the animal world.

Solomon, the legend goes, had a magic ring which enabled him to speak to the animals in their own language. Konrad Lorenz was gifted with a similar power of understanding the animal world. He was that rare beast, a brilliant scientist who could write beautifully. He did more than any other person to establish and popularize the study of how animals behave, receiving a Nobel Prize for his work. King Solomon's Ring , the book which brought him worldwide recognition, (...) is a delightful treasury of observations and insights into the lives of all sorts of creatures, from jackdaws and water-shrews to dogs, cats and even wolves. Charmingly illustrated by Lorenz himself, this book is a wonderfully written introduction to the world of our furred and feathered friends, a world which often provides an uncanny resemblance to our own. A must for any animal-lover! (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to initiate a systematic exploration of the model theory of epistemic plausibility models (EPMs). There are two subtly different definitions in the literature: one by van Benthem and one by Baltag and Smets. Because van Benthem's notion is the most general, most of the paper is dedicated to this notion. We focus on the notion of bisimulation, and show that the most natural generalization of bisimulation to van Benthem-type EPMs fails. We then introduce parametrized (...) bisimulations, and prove various bisimulationimplies- equivalence theorems, a Hennessy-Milner theorem, and several (un)definability results. We discuss the problems arising from the fact that these bisimulations are syntax-dependent (and thus not fully structural), and we present and compare two different ways of coping with this issue: adding a modality to the language, and putting extra constraints on the models. We argue that the most successful solution involves restricting to uniform and locally connected (van Benthem-type) EPMs: for this subclass the intuitively most natural notion of bisimulation and the technically sound notion coincide. Such EPMs turn out to correspond exactly with Baltag/Smets-type EPMs, which can be interpreted as constituting a methodological argument, favoring Baltag and Smets's definition of EPM over that of van Benthem. (shrink)

Aristotle takes practical wisdom and arts or crafts to be forms of knowledge which, we argue, can usefully be thought of as ‘empiricist’. This empiricism has two key features: knowledge does not rest on grasping unobservable natures or essences; and knowledge does not rest on grasping logical relations that hold among propositions. Instead, knowledge rests on observation, memory, experience and everyday uses of reason. While Aristotle’s conception of theoretical knowledge does require grasping unobservable essences and logical relations that hold among (...) suitable propositions, his conception of practical and productive knowledge avoids such requirements and is consistent with empiricism. (shrink)

In recent years, a number of authors have started studying Aristotelian diagrams containing metalogical notions, such as tautology, contradiction, satisfiability, contingency, strong and weak interpretations of contrariety, etc. The present paper is a contribution to this line of research, and its main aims are both to extend and to deepen our understanding of metalogical diagrams. As for extensions, we not only study several metalogical decorations of larger and less widely known Aristotelian diagrams, but also consider metalogical decorations of another type (...) of logical diagrams, viz. duality diagrams. At a more fundamental level, we present a unifying perspective which sheds new light on the connections between new and existing metalogical diagrams, as well as between object- and metalogical diagrams. Overall, the paper studies two types of logical diagrams and four kinds of metalogical decorations. (shrink)

Preface to Volumes 1 and 2 Lorenz Krüger xv Introduction to Volume 1 Lorraine J. Daston 1 I Revolution 1 What Are Scientific Revolutions? Thomas S. Kuhn 7 2 Scientific Revolutions, Revolutions in Science, and a Probabilistic Revolution 1800-1930 I. Bernard Cohen 23 3 Was There a Probabilistic Revolution 1800-1930? Ian Hacking 45 II Concepts 4 The Slow Rise of Probabilism: Philosophical Arguments in the Nineteenth Century Lorenz Krüger 59 5 The Decline of the Laplacian Theory of Probability: (...) A Study of Stumpf, von Kries, and Meinong Andreas Kamlah 91 6 Fechner’s Indeterminism: From Freedom to Laws of Chance Michael Heidelberger 117 7 The Saint Petersburg Paradox 1713-1937 Gerard Jorland 157 8 Laplace and Thereafter: The Status of Probability Calculus in the Nineteenth Century Ivo Schneider 191 9 Emile Borel as a Probabilist Eberhard Knobloch 215 III Uncertainty 10 The Domestication of Risk: Mathematical Probability and Insurance 1650-1830 237 11 The Objectification of Observation: Measurement and Statistical Methods in the Nineteenth Century Zeno G. Swijtink 261 12 The Measurement of Uncertainty in Nineteenth-Century Social Science Stephen M. Stigler 287 IV Society 13 Rational Individuals versus Laws of Society: From Probability to Statistics Lorraine J. Daston 295 14 Decrire, Compter, Calculer: The Debate over Statistics during the Napoleonic Period Marie-Noelle Bourguet 305 15 Probability in Vital and Social Statistics: Quetelet, Farr, and the Bertillons Bernard-Pierre Lécuyer 317 16 Paupers and Numbers: The Statistical Argument for Social Reform in Britain during the Period of Industrialization Karl H. Metz 337 17 Lawless Society: Social Science and the Reinterpretation of Statistics in Germany, 1850-1880 Theodore M. Porter 351 18 Prussian Numbers 1860-1882 Ian Hacking 377 19 How Do Sums Count? On the Cultural Origins of Statistical Causality M. Norton Wise 395. (shrink)

Keine ausführliche Beschreibung für "Grundlagen einer Theorie der Wahrheit" verfügbar.

This paper studies the Lockean thesis from the perspective of contemporary epistemic logic. The Lockean thesis states that belief can be defined as ‘sufficiently high degree of belief’. Its main problem is that it gives rise to a notion of belief which is not closed under conjunction. This problem is typical for classical epistemic logic: it is single-agent and static. I argue that from the perspective of contemporary epistemic logic, the Lockean thesis fares much better. I briefly mention that it (...) can successfully be extended from single-agent to multi-agent settings. More importantly, I show that accepting the Lockean thesis (and a more sophisticated version for conditional beliefs) leads to a significant and unexpected unification in the dynamic behavior of (conditional) belief and high (conditional) probability with respect to public announcements. This constitutes a methodological argument in favor of the Lockean thesis. Furthermore, if one accepts Baltag’s Erlangen program for epistemology, this technical observation has even stronger philosophical implications: because belief and high probability display the same dynamic behavior, it is plausible that they are indeed one and the same epistemic notion. (shrink)

This paper explores the interplay between logic-sensitivity and bitstring semantics in the square of opposition. Bitstring semantics is a combinatorial technique for representing the formulas that appear in a logical diagram, while logic-sensitivity entails that such a diagram may depend, not only on the formulas involved, but also on the logic with respect to which they are interpreted. These two topics have already been studied extensively in logical geometry, and are thus well-understood by themselves. However, the precise details of their (...) interplay turn out to be far more complicated. In particular, the paper describes an elegant and natural interaction between bitstrings and logic-sensitivity, which makes perfect sense when bitstrings are viewed as purely combinatorial entities. However, when we view bitstrings as semantically meaningful entities (which is actually the standard perspective, cf. the term ‘bitstring semantics’!), this interaction does not seem to have a full and equally natural counterpart. The paper describes some attempts to address this situation, but all of them are ultimately found wanting. For now, it thus remains an open problem to capture this interaction between bitstrings and logic-sensitivity from a semantic (rather than merely a combinatorial) perspective. (shrink)

Three parts of philosophical papers concerned with works, matters and traditions, respectively, present ways of dealing methodically with problems that arise while having and articulating experience. The contents range from philosophy in Antiquity as well as Buddhist to existentialism and analytic philosophy, from relating science and art to the antagonism between freedom and justice. By reflecting on the particular steps of argument the papers become samples of dialogical philosophy with respect both to subject matter and means of procedure.

Ancient philosophical theories of soul are in many respects sensitive to ways of speaking and thinking about the soul psuchê] that are not specifically philosophical or theoretical. We therefore begin with what the word ‘soul’ meant to speakers of Classical Greek, and what it would have been natural to think about and associate with the soul. We then turn to various Presocratic thinkers, and to the philosophical theories that are our primary concern, those of Plato (first in the Phaedo, then (...) in the Republic), Aristotle (in the De Anima or On the Soul ), Epicurus, and the Stoics. These are by far the most carefully worked out theories of soul in ancient philosophy. Later theoretical developments — for instance, in the writings of Plotinus and other Platonists, as well as the Church Fathers — are best studied against the background of the classical theories, from which, in large part, they derive. (shrink)

Although universities have undergone changes since the dawn of their existence, the speed of change started to accelerate remarkably in the 1960s. Spectacular growth in the number of students and faculty was immediately followed by administrative reforms aimed at managing this growth and managing the demands of students for democratic reform and societal relevance. Since the 1980s, however, an entirely different wind has been blowing along the academic corridors. The fiscal crisis of the welfare states and the neoliberal course of (...) the Reagan and Thatcher governments made the battle against budget deficits and against government spending into a political priority. Education, together with social security and health care, were targeted directly. As the eighties went on, the neoliberal agenda became more radical—smaller state and bigger market—attacking the public sector itself through efforts to systematically reduce public expenditure by privatizing public services and introducing market incentives. At the same time the societal relevance of the universities demanded by critical students was turned on its head to become economic relevance to business and industry in the knowledge society. (shrink)

This paper studies John Buridan's octagons of opposition for the de re modal propositions and the propositions of unusual construction. Both Buridan himself and the secondary literature have emphasized the strong similarities between these two octagons (as well as a third one, for propositions with oblique terms). In this paper, I argue that the interconnection between both octagons is more subtle than has previously been thought: if we move beyond the Aristotelian relations, and also take Boolean considerations into account, then (...) the strong analogy between Buridan's octagons starts to break down. These differences in Boolean structure can already be discerned within the octagons themselves; on a more abstract level, they lead to these two octagons having different degrees of Boolean complexity (i.e. Boolean closures of different sizes). These results are obtained by means of bitstring analysis, which is one of the key tools from contemporary logical geometry. Finally, I argue that this historical investigation is directly relevant for the theoretical framework of logical geometry, and discuss how it helps us to address certain open questions in this framework. (shrink)

"Presents, and in part develops, a systematic philosophy as the universal science, or the theorization of the unrestricted universe of discourse, explicitly including being as such and as a whole. Argues that complete exploration of the theoretical domain requires such a science"--Provided by publisher.

ABSTRACT:I argue that there are, according to Aristotle, two importantly different kinds of goals or ends in the domain of human agency and that one of these two kinds has been frequently, though not universally, overlooked. Apart from psychological goals, goals that agents adopt as their purposes, there are also, I submit, goals that actions have by being the kinds of actions they are and, in some cases, by occurring in the circumstances in which they do. These latter goals belong (...) to suitable actions whether or not agents adopt them as purposes and whether or not agents are aware of them. There is evidence both in Aristotle's ethical writings and in his discussion of chance and luck in Physics II.4–6 that he recognizes goals of this latter kind. (shrink)

In this paper, we consider certain cardinals in ZF (set theory without AC, the axiom of choice). In ZFC (set theory with AC), given any cardinals C and D, either C ≤ D or D ≤ C. However, in ZF this is no longer so. For a given infinite set A consider $\operatorname{seq}^{1 - 1}(A)$ , the set of all sequences of A without repetition. We compare $|\operatorname{seq}^{1 - 1}(A)|$ , the cardinality of this set, to |P(A)|, the cardinality of (...) the power set of A. What is provable about these two cardinals in ZF? The main result of this paper is that $ZF \vdash \forall A(|\operatorname{seq}^{1 - 1}(A)| \neq|\mathscr{P}(\mathscr{A})|)$ , and we show that this is the best possible result. Furthermore, it is provable in ZF that if B is an infinite set, then $|\operatorname{fin}(B)| <|\mathscr{P}(B)|$ even though the existence for some infinite set B* of a function f from $\operatorname{fin}(B^\ast)$ onto P(B*) is consistent with ZF. (shrink)

The extensive research in logic conducted by using concepts and methods of game theory as documented in this collection of papers, allows to see dialogue logic in a number of new perspectives. This situation may gain further clarity by looking back to the inception of dialogue logic in the late fifties and early sixties.

I PSYCHOLOGY 5 The Probabilistic Revolution in Psychology--an Overview Gerd Gigerenzer 7 1 Probabilistic Thinking and the Fight against Subjectivity Gerd Gigerenzer 11 2 Statistical Method and the Historical Development of Research Practice in American Psychology Kurt Danziger 35 3 Survival of the Fittest Probabilist: Brunswik, Thurstone, and the Two Disciplines of Psychology Gerd Gigerenzer 49 4 A Perspective for Viewing the Integration of Probability Theory in Psychology David J. Murray 73 II SOCIOLOGY 101 5 The Two Empirical Roots of (...) Social Theory and the Probability Revolution Anthony Oberschall 103 III ECONOMICS 133 The Probabilistic Revolution in Economics--an Overview Mary S. Morgan 135 6 Why Was There No Probabilistic Revolution in Economic Thought? Claude Mènard 139 7 The Rise of Macroeconomic Calculations in Economic Statistics Robert A. Horváth 147 8 Statistics without Probability and Haavelmo’s Revolution in Econometrics Mary S. Morgan 171 IV PHYSIOLOGY 199 9 Experimental Physiology and Statistical Inference: The Therapeutic Trial in Nineteenth-Century Germany William Coleman 201 V EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY 227 The Probabilistic Revolution in Evolutionary Biology--an Overview John H. Beatty 229 10 Natural Selection as a Causal, Empirical, and Probabilistic Theory M. J. S. Hodge 233 11 Dobzhansky and Drift: Facts, Values, and Chance in Evolutionary Biology John H. Beatty 271 12 Random Genetic Drift, R. A. Fisher, and the Oxford School of Ecological Genetics John R. G. Turner 313 13 On the Prior Probability of the Existence of Life Bernd-Olaf Küppers 355 VI PHYSICS 371 The Probabilistic Revolution in Physics--an Overview Lorenz Krüger 373 14 Probabilistic Physics the Classical Way Jan von Plato 379 15 Max Born and the Reality of Quantum Probabilities Nancy Cartwright 409 16 Philosophical Problems of Quantum Theory: The Response of American Physicists Nancy Cartwright. (shrink)

The theory of Participatory Discrepancies (or PDs) claims that minute temporal asynchronies (microtiming) in music performance are crucial for prompting bodily entrainment in listeners, which is a fundamental effect of the “groove” experience. Previous research has failed to find evidence to support this theory. The present study tested the influence of varying PD magnitudes on the beat-related body movement behavior of music listeners. 160 participants (79 music experts, 81 non-experts) listened to twelve music clips in either Funk or Swing style. (...) These stimuli were based on two audio recordings (one in each style) of expert drum and bass duo performances. In one series of six clips, the PDs were downscaled from their originally performed magnitude to complete quantization in steps of 20%. In another series of six clips, the PDs were upscaled from their original magnitude to double magnitude in steps of 20%. The intensity of the listeners’ beat-related head movement was measured using video-based motion capture technology and Fourier analysis. A mixed-design four-factor ANOVA showed that the PD manipulations had a significant effect on the expert listeners’ entrainment behavior. The experts moved more when listening to stimuli with PDs that were downscaled by 60% compared to completely quantized stimuli. This finding offers partial support for PD theory: PDs of a certain magnitude do augment entrainment in listeners. But the effect was found to be small to moderately sized, and it affected music expert listeners only. (shrink)

Keine ausführliche Beschreibung für "Universalgenie Helmholtz" verfügbar.

If we assume the axiom of choice, then every two cardinal numbers are comparable, In the absence of the axiom of choice, this is no longer so. For a few cardinalities related to an arbitrary infinite set, we will give all the possible relationships between them, where possible means that the relationship is consistent with the axioms of set theory. Further we investigate the relationships between some other cardinal numbers in specific permutation models and give some results provable without using (...) the axiom of choice. (shrink)

For a set M, let \\) denote the set of all finite sequences which can be formed with elements of M, and let \ denote the set of all 2-element subsets of M. Furthermore, for a set A, let Open image in new window denote the cardinality of A. It will be shown that the following statement is consistent with Zermelo–Fraenkel Set Theory \: There exists a set M such that Open image in new window and no function Open image (...) in new window is finite-to-one. (shrink)

This paper studies Aumann’s agreeing to disagree theorem from the perspective of dynamic epistemic logic. This was first done by Dégremont and Roy (J Phil Log 41:735–764, 2012) in the qualitative framework of plausibility models. The current paper uses a probabilistic framework, and thus stays closer to Aumann’s original formulation. The paper first introduces enriched probabilistic Kripke frames and models, and various ways of updating them. This framework is then used to prove several agreement theorems, which are natural formalizations of (...) Aumann’s original result. Furthermore, a sound and complete axiomatization of a dynamic agreement logic is provided, in which one of these agreement theorems can be derived syntactically. These technical results are used to show the importance of explicitly representing the dynamics behind the agreement theorem, and lead to a clarification of some conceptual issues surrounding the agreement theorem, in particular concerning the role of common knowledge. The formalization of the agreement theorem thus constitutes a concrete example of the so-called dynamic turn in logic. (shrink)

Duality in Logic and Language [draft--do not cite this article] Duality phenomena occur in nearly all mathematically formalized disciplines, such as algebra, geometry, logic and natural language semantics. However, many of these disciplines use the term ‘duality’ in vastly different senses, and while some of these senses are intimately connected to each other, others seem to be entirely … Continue reading Duality in Logic and Language →.