Assertion is the central vehicle for the sharing of knowledge. Whether knowledge is shared successfully often depends on the quality of assertions: good assertions lead to successful knowledge sharing, while bad ones don't. In Sharing Knowledge, Christoph Kelp and Mona Simion investigate the relation between knowledge sharing and assertion, and develop an account of what it is to assert well. More specifically, they argue that the function of assertion is to share knowledge with others. It is this function that (...) supports a central norm of assertion according to which a good assertion is one that has the disposition to generate knowledge in others. The book uses this functionalist approach to motivate further norms of assertion on both the speaker and the hearer side and investigates ramifications of this view for other questions about assertion. (shrink)

While it seems obvious that the embodied self is both a subject of experience and an object in the world, it is not clear how, or even whether, both of these senses of self can refer to thesameself. According to Husserl, the relation between these two senses of self is beset by the “paradox of human subjectivity.” Following Husserl’s lead, scholars have attempted to resolve the paradox of subjectivity. This paper categorizes the different formulations of the paradox according to the (...) dimension each pertains to and considers the prospects of each proposed resolution. It will be shown that, contrary to the claims of the respective authors, their attempted resolutions do not really resolve the paradox, but instead rephrase it or push it to the next dimension. This suggests that there is something deeper at work than a mere misunderstanding. This paper does not aim to resolve the paradox but instead initiates a new approach to it. Instead of seeing the paradox as a misapprehension that needs to be removed, I dig deeper to reveal its roots in ordinary consciousness. Investigating the proposed resolutions will reveal the fundamental role of the natural attitude, and I will argue that already the general thesis of the natural attitude makes the decisive cut that leads to what Sartre calls a “fissure” in pre-reflective self-awareness. The phenomenological reduction deepens the cut into what Husserl calls the “split of the self,” which in turn engenders the paradox of subjectivity. The paradox’s roots in the structure of ordinary consciousness not only constitute a reason for its persistence, but also suggest a new way to further investigate the embodied self. (shrink)

It has recently been argued that, contrary to first appearances, knowledge is not distinctively valuable. The argumentative strategy of value sceptics in epistemology is to identify a challenge that any satisfactory account of the distinctive value of knowledge will have to meet and to argue that no viable theory of knowledge does the job. This paper argues that the value sceptical argument is unsuccessful in that it does not establish that a virtue epistemological account of the value of knowledge fails.

Berlin has become the German place of remembrance for 1968. In other cities, too, students, artists, and professors rose up against authoritarian ways of life and institutions, pointing to the “fascism” of the Nazi period that their parents wished to repress. But remembrance likes the beauty of appearances, and the revolt in Berlin was initially colored by something unreal and playful, a counterpoint led to its conclusion, something both bounded and experimental. This something was lost between 1967 and 1969, though (...) it was even less present outside of Berlin, perhaps because of the delay with which the revolt spread beyond.. (shrink)

_Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation_ offers a resolution of one of the most vexing problems in Nietzsche scholarship. As perhaps the most significant predecessor of more recent attempts to formulate a postmetaphysical epistemology and ontology, Nietzsche is considered by many critics to share this problem with his successors: How can an antifoundationalist philosophy avoid vicious relativism and legitimate its claim to provide a platform for the critique of arguments, practices, and institutions? Christoph Cox argues that Nietzsche successfully navigates between relativism (...) and dogmatism, accepting the naturalistic critique of metaphysics and theology provided by modern science, yet maintaining that a thoroughgoing naturalism must move beyond scientific reductionism. It must accept a central feature of aesthetic understanding: acknowledgment of the primacy and irreducibility of interpretation. This view of Nietzsche's doctrines of perspectivism, becoming, and will to power as products of an overall naturalism balanced by a reciprocal commitment to interpretationism will spur new discussions of epistemology and ontology in contemporary thought. (shrink)

Digitale Produkte, Dienste sowie Kommunikationsformen zeichnen sich besonders dadurch aus, dass sie im physikalischen Sinne immateriell sind. Aus dieser Eigenschaft folgen vielfältige Möglichkeiten, Lebenspraktiken und Lebenswelten individuell zu gestalten. Leicht zu verbreitende Digitalprodukte vermitteln gesteigerte Wirksamkeitserfahrung, welche den Digitalen Wandel wirtschaftlich, technisch und gesellschaftlich in Gang hält. Wachstumsgrenzen scheinen durch disruptive Innovationen der Künstlichen Intelligenz, der digitalen Vernetzung sowie auch der Virtualisierung von Lebenswelten zu diffundieren. Ein systemischer Blick auf die Veränderungsdynamiken führt zur Einsicht, dass Anerkennungswettläufe zur Sicherung der sozialen (...) Position entbrennen. Um einer Abwärtsspirale zu entfliehen, fühlen sich Individuen sowie wirtschaftliche Akteure genötigt, Verwirklichungschancen der Digitaltechnologie ergreifen zu müssen, da ansonsten die Todeserfahrung einer sozialen oder wirtschaftlichen Irrelevanz droht. Diesem Krisenphänomen setzt das Buch eine Idee entgegen, wie aus selbstfürsorglicher Integrität heraus eine lebensdienliche und vor allem gerechte Digitalität verwirklicht werden könnte. (shrink)

The gratiarum actio of the acting consuls can be seen as a key political ritual of the High Empire and as an important aspect of the communication between senatorial aristocracy and princeps. The only surviving speech of this type from this period, Pliny’s Panegyricus, has, however, been judged very differently due to a lack of comparison. In this context, it is often overlooked that although the gratiarum actio of M. Cornelius Fronto has not survived, the Corpus Frontonianum contains both illuminating (...) references to this speech delivered in 142 AD in the absence of the princeps and Antoninus Pius’ reaction to its published version. This article asks about the possible insights into the panegyric ritual that emerge from these fragments of information. (shrink)

Proponents of conditional logics such as David Lewis and Robert Stalnaker reject inferences containing counterfactuals from "if A, B" and "if B, C" to "if A, C" due to ordinary language counterexamples. Contextualists defend this inference rule called "hypothetical syllogism" or "transitivity" on the basis of a possible word semantics, which, however, assigns implausible truth values to certain counterfactuals. My defence of hypothetical syllogism avoids this problem, as it rests on Nelson Goodman's uncontroversial, metaphysically parsimonious assumption that we accept counterfactuals (...) as true only under certain conditions from which, in conjunction with the antecedent, the consequent can be inferred. The counterexamples to hypothetical syllogism can be rebutted because their premises are doxastically noncotenable; that is, there is no set of conditions under which the premises can be accepted as jointly true. (shrink)

The declaration of equal rights arguably created the modern political community. But this act of empowering individuals caused the disempowering of the political community. Exposing this, Menke opens up a new way of understanding rights that no longer involves the disempowering of the political community.

Von der Antike bis in die Gegenwart. Verständlich und anschaulich geschrieben, führt der Klassiker durch die wichtigsten Stationen des philosophischen Denkens. Die 4. Auflage wurde um die philosophischen Entwicklungen seit den 1990er Jahren ergänzt. Dazu gehören u. a. Analytische Philosophie, Ethik, Virtuelle Realität, Philosophie der Gefühle und Philosophie als Lebensform. Eine Besonderheit ist das umfangreiche Kapitel über die Philosophie des Ostens: Indien, China, Japan.

For Proclus, like other Platonists, logic, epistemology, and philosophy of language are not distinct as a tool and parts of philosophy respectively, but are all part of dialectic. This chapter first briefly addresses Proclus’ logic, specifically the ‘rule of obversion’ ascribed to him, and his naturalist philosophy of language, and thereafter moves on to epistemology. The author discusses Proclus’ top-down psychology, where the highest faculty is the paradigm for the lower ones; the Iamblichean principle that knower determines knowledge; the essential (...) reason-principles, or lower forms constituting the soul’s essence; Proclus’ rich notion of recollection; his solutions to two challenges to his epistemology: the knowledge of things of which there is no Form, and the use of images in cognition. Finally, in the conclusion the author assesses Proclus’ originality and discusses the fact that for late Neoplatonists knowledge is not an end in itself. (shrink)

Das 12. Jahrhundert gilt als eine Epoche gro.

Im Artikel wird Max Schelers phänomenologischer Zugang zur Realität des Moralischen gegenüber rein prozeduralistischen Begründungsmodellen der Moral profiliert. Dabei steht Schelers Zuordnung von Vernunft und Gefühl im Zentrum. Die Interpretation hebt vor allem zwei Punkte hervor: Zum einen zeigt sie, inwiefern Scheler den Akzent auf die erlebten Sinnzusammenhänge lenkt, die dem Versuch einer rein argumentativ-rationalen Begründung von Moral nicht nur unweigerlich vorausliegen, sondern ihn selbst erst als einen sinnvollen Versuch erscheinen lassen. Zum anderen lenkt sie den Blick auf eine theorie-immanente (...) Spannung, die schließlich dazu Anlass ist, an einer bestimmten Stelle über Schelers Ansatz hinauszugehen. Und so schließt der Artikel mit der These, dass dem Wertfühlen zwar eine fundamentale Rolle im Erschließungsprozess des Moralischen zuzuerkennen ist, es aber nicht mit dem Prozess im Ganzen identifiziert werden kann.The article explores Max Schelers phenomenological approach to the sphere of morality as an alternative to an understanding of the moral world in exclusively procedural terms. For this purpose it focuses on the relation of reason and feeling. The interpretation highlights mainly two points: On the one hand it shows to what extent Scheler accentuates the immediate experience of moral meanings as the necessary condition of every rational moral discourse. On the other hand it elaborates on a problem within Schelers theory itself and finally comes to the conclusion that although the immediate feeling of values plays a decisive role in the process of our moral experience, it must not be identified with the entire process. (shrink)

Fruto de um seminário ocorrido no Sesc Consolação em 2015, este livro traz reflexões de intelectuais brasileiros e alemães sobre o tema da sabedoria no mundo contemporâneo. Educar para sabedoria, a relação entre saber e não saber, a sabedoria frente ao poder da economia, a sabedoria e o futuro e a sabedoria do coração são alguns dos temas abordados nesta obra, que pretende resgatar e qualificar uma discussão passível de aguçar nossa capacidade de discernimento em um cotidiano inundado pelo excesso (...) de informações. (shrink)

In this chapter, I discuss some ways in which debates about temporal experience intersect with wider debates about the nature of perception in general. In particular, I suggest that bearing in mind some general questions about the nature of perception can help with demarcating different theoretical approaches to temporal experience. Much of the current debate about temporal experience in philosophy is framed in terms of a debate between three specific main positions sometimes referred to as the extensional model, the retentional (...) model and the cinematic model. It is typically assumed that the differences between these three models are obvious. Yet, on closer inspection, it turns out to be surprisingly difficult to make out what exactly distinguishes the cinematic model from the extensional one, on the one hand, and from the retentional model, on the other. I criticise some existing ways in which the models are sometimes demarcated from one another, before suggesting that the differences between the three views become clearer if the debate between them is seen as turning on contrasting pictures of the nature of perceptual experience they embody. (shrink)

_Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation_ offers a resolution of one of the most vexing problems in Nietzsche scholarship. As perhaps the most significant predecessor of more recent attempts to formulate a postmetaphysical epistemology and ontology, Nietzsche is considered by many critics to share this problem with his successors: How can an antifoundationalist philosophy avoid vicious relativism and legitimate its claim to provide a platform for the critique of arguments, practices, and institutions? Christoph Cox argues that Nietzsche successfully navigates between relativism (...) and dogmatism, accepting the naturalistic critique of metaphysics and theology provided by modern science, yet maintaining that a thoroughgoing naturalism must move beyond scientific reductionism. It must accept a central feature of aesthetic understanding: acknowledgment of the primacy and irreducibility of interpretation. This view of Nietzsche's doctrines of perspectivism, becoming, and will to power as products of an overall naturalism balanced by a reciprocal commitment to interpretationism will spur new discussions of epistemology and ontology in contemporary thought. (shrink)

Theories are an integral part of the scientific endeavour. The target article proposes interesting ideas for a theory on human–robot interaction but lacks specificity that would enable us to properly test this theory. No empirical data are yet available to determine its predictive power.