Name der Zeitschrift: Klio Jahrgang: 97 Heft: 1 Seiten: 319-323.

Essential reading for students and scholars of philosophy of language and mind, Reading Brandom is also an excellent companion volume to Reading McDowell: On ...

Introduces the phenomenology of the Other, taking into account the work of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Schutz, and Derrida, but mostly going back to things themselves.

In opposition to traditional forms of dualism and monism, the author holds that our bodily self includes certain aspects of otherness. This is shown concerning the phenomenological issues of intentionality, of self-awareness and of intersubjectivity, by emphasizing the dimension of pathos. We are affected by what happens to us before being able to respond to it by acts or actions. Every sense, myself and others are born out of pathos. The original alienness of our own body, including neurological processes, creates (...) shifting degrees of nearness and remoteness, and allows for pathological deviations such as depersonalisation, paranoia or trauma. Such a phenomenology of body crosses the borderlines of different disciplines. (shrink)

Frames are a concept in knowledge representation that explains how the receiver, using background information, completes the information conveyed by the sender. This concept is used in different disciplines, most notably in cognitive linguistics and artificial intelligence. This paper argues that frames can serve as the basis for describing mathematical proofs. The usefulness of the concept is illustrated by giving a partial formalisation of proof frames, specifically focusing on induction proofs, and relevant parts of the mathematical theory within which the (...) proofs are conducted; for the latter, we look at natural numbers and trees specifically. (shrink)

Religions commonly are taken to provide general orientation in leading one's life. We develop here the idea that religions also may have a much more concrete guidance function in providing systematic decision biases in the face of cognitive-control dilemmas. In particular, we assume that the selective reward that religious belief systems provide for rule-conforming behavior induces systematic biases in cognitive-control parameters that are functional in producing the wanted behavior. These biases serve as default values under uncertainty and affect performance in (...) any task that shares cognitive-control operations with the religiously motivated rule-conforming behavior the biases were originally developed for. Such biases therefore can be unraveled and objectified by means of rather simple tasks that are relatively well understood with regard to the cognitive mechanisms they draw on. (shrink)

Without directly addressing the Demarcation Problem for logic—the problem of distinguishing logical vocabulary from others—we focus on distinctive aspects of logical vocabulary in pursuit of a second goal in the philosophy of logic, namely, proposing criteria for the justification of logical rules. Our preferred approach has three components. Two of these are effectively Belnap’s, but with a twist. We agree with Belnap’s response to Prior’s challenge to inferentialist characterisations of the meanings of logical constants. Belnap argued that for a logical (...) constant to exist, its rules must be conservative over a previously given consequence relation and guarantee the uniqueness of the constant. The twist is that we require logical vocabulary to be provably conservative, not over a previously given formal consequence relation, but over a previously given meaningful vocabulary of a language. Uniqueness is also a feature defined in terms of provability: if two syntactically distinguished expressions are governed by the same rules, then formulas with them as main operators are interderivable. Belnap’s criteria are not only those for the existence of a logical constant, but more: they are what distinguishes logical vocabulary from all other expressions. It is the defining mark of a logical constant that it is provably conservative over the fragment of the language which excludes it and that its rules guarantee its uniqueness. The third component is the topic neutrality of logic. The provable conservativeness of logic over a previously given vocabulary of a language is motivated, in part, by appeal to molecularism in the theory of meaning. Molecularity is a feature endorsed by the theory of meaning as a whole, so it does not distinguish logical constants from other expressions. The same is true for conservativeness. We argue that molecularity, and hence conservativeness, are implicit presuppositions of speakers’ use of language: the addition of new vocabulary to a language is presupposed to be conservative. But this presupposition is one that we should be able reflectively to endorse (such as when attempting a rational reconstruction of the use of the vocabulary). Thus, where conservativeness is found to fail, this defect should be remedied and the use of the vocabulary corrected (as in classical negation) or excised altogether (as in pejoratives). We go on to characterise a notion of topic neutrality, which we argue applies to logical vocabulary. We then note that reflective endorsement of the conservativeness of a topic neutral vocabulary requires a proof that the vocabulary is conservative relative to any base vocabulary. Thus we require that logical vocabulary be demonstrably conservative. Allying this requirement, distinctive of logic, to a general consideration about the commitments of assertion yields a mode of justification for logical constants akin to some conceptions of Harmony, i.e., to the idea that the consequences of assertion of a logical complex need to be warranted by the grounds and ought to be the strongest consequences warranted by the grounds. Intuitionistic logic acquires a somewhat familiar justification but emanating from a new motivation. (shrink)

Michael Dummett's approach to the metaphysical issue of realism through the philosophy of language, his challenge to realism, and his philosophy of language itself are central topics in contemporary analytic philosophy and have influenced the work of other major figures such as Quine, Putnam, and Davidson. This book offers an accessible and systematic presentation of the main elements of Dummett's philosophy. This book's overarching theme is Dummett's discussion of realism: his characterization of realism, his attack on realism, and his invention (...) and exploration of the anti-realist position. This book begins by examining Dummett's views on language. Only against that setting can one fully appreciate his conception of the realism issue. With this in place, Weiss returns to Dummett's views on the nature of meaning and understanding to unfold his challenge to realism. Weiss devotes the remainder of the book to examining the anti-realist position. He discusses anti-realist theories of meaning and then investigates anti-realism's revisionary consequences. Finally, he engages with Dummett's discussion of two difficult challenges for the anti-realist: the past and mathematics. (shrink)

This paper seeks to introduce cultural techniques to an Anglophone readership. Specifically geared towards an Anglophone readership, the paper relates the re-emergence of cultural techniques (a concept first employed in the 19th century in an agricultural context) to the changing intellectual constellation of postwar Germany. More specifically, it traces how the concept evolved from – and reacted against – so-called German media theory, a decidedly anti-hermeneutic and anti-humanist current of thought frequently associated with the work of Friedrich Kittler. Post-hermeneutic rather (...) than anti-hermeneutic in its outlook, the reconceptualization of cultural techniques aims at presenting them as chains of operations that link humans, things, media and even animals. To investigate cultural techniques is to shift the analytic gaze from ontological distinctions to the ontic operations that gave rise to the former in the first place. As Siegert points out, this shift recalls certain concurrent developments within the North American posthumanities; the paper therefore also includes a discussion of the similarities and differences between German and North American posthumanism. (shrink)

Based on the argument that violence has a parasitic quality rather than an essence of its own, this article seeks to bring to light the conversion processes through which violence crystallises out of, as well as into, various phenomena. Violence is first examined in terms of the relation between perpetrator and victim with, however, an emphasis on the fact that violence cannot be reduced to the intention or the act of the perpetrator. On the contrary, violence is shown to have (...) the character of pathos and to open up a dimension of which the act itself is only a part. Further, the author argues that in being directed towards the other, violence harbours a performative contradiction: by turning the addressee into a thing to be destroyed, the addressing act cancels itself. The paper also sets out to identify the breeding grounds of violence, which, due to its capacity for conversion, can be detected in various phenomena that are not necessarily linked to violence. This means that violence can resort to various mechanisms and can emerge in multiple fields of activity: in bureaucracy, economics, medicine, politics, war, and most importantly, in everyday life, hidden under inconspicuous but sometimes pervasive forms. Finally, the metamorphoses of violence are shown to ultimately rest on the temporal character of violence, which implies that violence has a time of preparation and an aftermath. (shrink)

Frames are a concept in knowledge representation that explains how the receiver, using background information, completes the information conveyed by the sender. This concept is used in different disciplines, most notably in cognitive linguistics and artificial intelligence. This paper argues that frames can serve as the basis for describing mathematical proofs. The usefulness of the concept is illustrated by giving a partial formalisation of proof frames, specifically focusing on induction proofs, and relevant parts of the mathematical theory within which the (...) proofs are conducted; for the latter, we look at natural numbers and trees specifically. (shrink)

Il est évident que l’attention ne fait pas partie des grands thèmes de la philosophie occidentale en tant que celle-ci s’occupe de l’être, du temps, de l’espace, de la liberté ou du sujet. Une telle réserve donne à penser. Il me semble qu’elle s’explique par quelques points faibles, inhérents aux interprétations traditionnelles. Premièrement, l’attention se réduit à une étape préparatoire, à une double fonction : il faut ouvrir les yeux et dresser les oreilles, et le reste viendra. Deuxièmeme...

An ambitious work that endorses a broad approach, it argues strongly against the roles both of truth theory and of radical interpretation. Weiss discusses a range of relevant themes relating to language, including translation, interpretation, normativity, community, and rules in order to reshape our understanding of language. A rigorous and systematic analysis, How to Understand Language advances the work of key thinkers in the area.

In this paper we bring together results from a series of previous papers to prove the constructive version of the Gelfand duality theorem in any Grothendieck topos , obtaining a dual equivalence between the category of commutative C*-algebras and the category of compact, completely regular locales in the topos.

Formal control systems are a common instrument to align employees’ interests with those of managers and companies. However, research shows that employees perceive formal controls as a sign of distrust and restraint, which can lead to costs of control in the form of lower employee cooperation and effort. We propose that charitable giving reduces these costs of control. We draw on the halo effect and propose that corporate charitable giving alters employees’ perception of and reaction to formal controls. In a (...) laboratory experiment, we find that charitable giving by a company creates a higher level of employee trust in a manager who decides to implement a control and a more positive assessment of formal control. These positive effects of charitable giving lead to lower costs of control compared to the absence of charitable giving. We thereby provide an example of how charitable giving as a corporate social responsibility activity yields positive benefits by altering the behavior of internal company stakeholders. (shrink)

Die Beiträge zur Altertumskunde enthalten Monographien, Sammelbände, Editionen, Übersetzungen und Kommentare zu Themen aus den Bereichen Klassische, Mittel- und Neulateinische Philologie, Alte Geschichte, Archäologie, Antike Philosophie sowie Nachwirken der Antike bis in die Neuzeit. Dadurch leistet die Reihe einen umfassenden Beitrag zur Erschließung klassischer Literatur und zur Forschung im gesamten Gebiet der Altertumswissenschaften.

This book presents the views of the founders of constructivism and modern systems theory, who are still providing stimulating cues for international scientific debate. The conversations turn on the results of brain research, the breaks through of cybernetics, the linguistic determination of thought, and the intrinsic connection between epistemology and ethical practice.

Recently, radical democratic initiatives have been undertaken by freelancers and founders who come together in a range of alternative forms such as ethical entrepreneurial coalitions, urban coworking spaces, and open cooperative networks. In this paper, we argue that these initiatives to invent alternative, more equal forms of organizing engage strongly with relational activities to replace hierarchical interaction with distributed peer collaboration. While the literature has emphasized the sense of experimentation and reflexivity of these alternative forms of organizing, this paper especially (...) draws attention to the affective dynamics of everyday peer-to-peer collaboration. Drawing on an 18-month ethnography of a cooperative network of social entrepreneurs, we use a practice-based approach to study peer collaboration as a relational practice formed through a nexus of ‘weaving,’ ‘sharing,’ and ‘caring’ activities. Focusing on the affective orders enveloping relational practice, we document how the practice of peer collaboration is imbued by what we call an ‘affective oscillation’ forming contrasting amplitudes between confidence and frustration, exuberance and anxiety, and trust and exhaustion. As our core contribution, we problematize how the affirmative intent of radical democratic organizing is potentially jeopardized by this ‘cloudy affectivity,’ and we conclude that the collective pursuit of embodied ethical encounters is formed by slowing down and feeling into affective oscillation. (shrink)

The article delineates the program of a praxeology of truth that allows for studying the dynamics and variability of truth in the sense of situated doing truth. It proposes a heuristic differentiation between »truth scenes« and »truth figures« that helps to analyze the emergence of theories of truth as well as that of specific truth cultures.

Experience is investigated according to those breaking points where the unexpected surfaces and the surprise of the extraordinary and the alien breaks through. What happens is always in the postponement between pathos and response; this represents the fundamental agreement of a responsive phenomenology: it is never a quiet succession, but always something arriving too early or too late. Threshold experiences such as hesitation, delay, waiting, pausing, stumbling are investigated in this framework.

A "concept" in the sense favoured by Wittgenstein is a paradigm for a transition between parts of a notational system. A concept-determining sentence such as "There is no reddish green" registers the absence of such a transition. This suggests a plausible account of what is perceived in an experiment that was first designed by Crane and Piantanida, who claim to have induced perceptions of reddish green. I shall propose a redescription of the relevant phenomena, invoking only ordinary colour concepts. This (...) redescription is not ruled out by anything the experimenters say. It accounts for certain peculiarities in both their descriptions and their subjects', and suggests that instead of discovering forbidden colours the experimenters introduced a new use of "-ish". Still, there is a point in speaking of "reddish green" in their context, which can be motivated by invoking what Wittgenstein calls a "physiognomy". (shrink)

Experience is investigated according to those breaking points where the unexpected surfaces and the surprise of the extraordinary and the alien breaks through. What happens is always in the postponement between pathos and response; this represents the fundamental agreement of a responsive phenomenology: it is never a quiet succession, but always something arriving too early or too late. Threshold experiences such as hesitation, delay, waiting, pausing, stumbling are investigated in this framework.

El presente artículo tiene como objetivo esbozar algunos motivos fundamentales de una teoría de la atención sobre la base de una fenomenología responsiva orientada por el cuerpo. Una fenomenología de la atención no se conforma ni con actos subjetivos ni con mecanismos anónimos. La atención se presenta más bien como un acontecimiento doble: algo nos llama la atención – prestamos atención. Algo nos sobreviene antes de que nos percatemos de ello. Entre ambos momentos se abre una brecha insalvable. La atención (...) vivida excede nuestros propios proyectos, así como las técnicas y prácticas que determinan nuestro comportamiento. Los conflictos de atención apuntan a un ethos que nos confronta con lo inesperado y culmina en una consideración que debemos al otro. (shrink)

The article undertakes a rereading of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy with a focus on its two central achievements – reviving the Dionysus myth and making the origin of tragedy evident – whose mutual interrelatedness has attracted only sparse critical attention to date. Working more as a myth-maker than a theorist, Nietzsche advances a groundbreaking portrayal of the story of Dionysus that allows him to lay bare the origins of tragedy. Simultaneously, his identification of tragedy’s ultimate source suggests a configuration that (...) lends the Dionysus myth new currency. In so doing, Nietzsche conceives the manifest presence of this myth – as well as that of the origins of tragedy – as a specific recombination of the Dionysian and the Apollonian: not as an Apollonian taming or sublimation of the Dionysian, nor yet as dialectical mediation, but rather as the Apollonian’s seizure by the Dionysian, which teeters on the threshold between lurching toward and postponing a new, more comprehensively Dionysian loss of boundaries. In this way, Nietzsche suggests, there is generated a »Schauen und Sehnen über das Schauen hinaus,« a mode of viewing amplified by longing, through which the specific form of the Dionysus myth from the perspective of tragedy and conversely of tragedy from the perspective of myth becomes apparent. The fulfillment of Nietzsche’s vision in dramatic art is here exemplified by Hofmannsthal’s Elektra. (shrink)

Russell takes his paper ?On denoting? to have achieved the repudiation of the theory of denoting concepts and Frege?s theory of sense, and the invention of the notion of incomplete symbols.This means that Russell attempts to solve the set theoretic and semantic paradoxes without making use of a theory of sense.Instead, his strategy is to revise his logical ontology by arguing that certain symbols should be treated as incomplete.In constructing such arguments Russell, at various points, makes use of epistemological and (...) metaphysical considerations.These arguments do not form themselves into a systemic set of considerations to be used in appraising a logical system.Finally, the vicious circle principle is argued for on the basis of considerations, which are presumed evident, about the nature of propositional functions.The stringency of this principle is a basic problem for the system of Principia mathematica.However, even given the terms of the argument, ?On denoting? does not offer a complete repudiation of the notion of sense.This allows the possibility of retaining some of the insights of Principia mathematica whilst rejecting the stringency of the vicious circle principle.The basis of such a system is the theory of sense. (shrink)

Most standard results on structure identification in first order theories depend upon the correctness and completeness (in the limit) of the data, which are provided to the learner. These assumption are essential for the reliability of inductive methods and for their limiting success (convergence to the truth). The paper investigates inductive inference from (possibly) incorrect and incomplete data. It is shown that such methods can be reliable not in the sense of truth approximation, but in the sense that the methods (...) converge to "empirically adequate" theories, i.e. theories, which are consistent with all data (past and future) and complete with respect to a given complexity class of L-sentences. Adequate theories of bounded complexity can be inferred uniformly and effectively by polynomial-time learning algorithms. Adequate theories of unbounded complexity can be inferred pointwise by less efficient methods. (shrink)

: Some twenty years since its publication Putnam's model‐theoretic argument is still much discussed. The present paper aims to defend a reconstruction of the argument but begins by attempting to clarify the form of the argument. Usually, and with good textual grounds, the argument is treated as a reductio argument against metaphysical realism. I argue instead that it should be treated as developing a paradox. I go on to claim that the most promising response to this paradox is to be (...) able to provide a theory of sense, in the style recommended by Dummett. So, according to this reasoning, the argument is not an argument against metaphysical realism but an argument against positions which reject the notion of sense. (shrink)

This chapter presents new findings about Maria von Herbert's life. Building on this, an interpretation is offered of what she means when she calls upon Kant "for solace ... or for counsel to prepare [her] for death". It is then argued that Kant's reply is more satisfactory than is commonly appreciated, as he explicitly defines the roles which he is prepared to adopt – that of a "moral physician" and of a "mediator" -- and thus the standards by which to (...) judge his reply. Having said that, his letter does not address what has been viewed as a challenge to Kantian ethics. It is a matter of dispute what exactly this challenge consists in. This chapter identifies the challenge and the terms in which it is most productively stated. Finally, it provides sufficient reasons to establish that a portrait that resurfaced in November 2016 does indeed depict Maria von Herbert. (shrink)

The paper examines Wright’s attempt to inflate deflationism about truth. It accepts the details of Wright’s argument but contends that it should best be seen as posing a dilemma for the deflationist: either truth is independent of norms of warranted assertibility—in which case it is substantial—or it is not—in which case epistemicism about truth is a consequence. Some concerns about epistemicism are raised in avoiding the second horn. The first is avoided by distinguishing between independence and substantiality and arguing that (...) only the first applies to truth and only the second is worrisome to deflationism. So, despite its sub-title, the following is not a diatribe against Home Rule but a modest defence of deflationism. (shrink)

It is shown in Zermelo-Fraenkel Set Theory that Cκ, the Axiom of Choice for κ-indexed families of arbitrary sets, is equivalent to the condition that the frame envelope of any κ-frame is κ-Lindelöf, for any cardinal κ.