The purpose of this study is to assess Husserl’s debt to Lotze’s philosophy during the Halle period (1886-1901). I shall first track the sources of Husserl’s knowledge of Lotze’s philosophy during his studies with Brentano in Vienna and then with Stumpf in Halle. I shall then briefly comment on Husserl’s references to Lotze in his early work and research manuscripts for the second volume of his Philosophy of Arithmetic. In the third section, I examine Lotze’s influence on Husserl’s antipsychologistic turn (...) in the mid-1890s. The fourth section is a commentary on Husserl’s manuscript entitled “Microcosmus,” to which he explicitly refers in his Prolegomena, and which he planned to publish as an annex of his Logical Investigations. This work contains a detailed analysis of the third book of Lotze’s 1874 Logic. The last section examines Husserl’s arguments against logical psychologism in his Prolegomena, which I discuss through the lens of Stumpf’s critique of psychologism in his paper “Psychology and theory of knowledge”. I argue that Stumpf’s early works on this topic make it possible to establish a connection between Lotze’s interpretation of Plato’s theory of Ideas and Husserl’s antipsychologism. My hypothesis is that Stumpf’s analyses represent the background of Husserl's critique of logical psychologism in his Logical Investigations. I shall conclude this study by showing that Husserl’s position with respect to Lotze’s philosophy remains basically unchanged after the publication of his Logical Investigations, and that Husserl’s main criticism of Lotze pertains, in the final analysis, to the absence of a theory of intentionality in Lotze’s philosophy. (shrink)

El propósito del presente estudio es afirmar la deuda de Husserl con la filosofía de Lotze durante el período de Halle. Mi interés se centra especialmente en el pensamiento del joven Husserl desde su llegada a Halle en 1886 hasta la publicación de su Hauptwerk en 1900-1901. Primero me remontaré a las fuentes del conocimiento de la filosofía de Lotze por parte de Husserl durante sus estudios con Brentano en Viena y después con Stumpf en Halle. Luego comentaré brevemente las (...) referencias de Husserl a Lotze en sus primeros trabajos y en sus manuscritos de investigación para el segundo volumen de su Filosofía de la aritmética. En la tercera sección, examino la influencia de Lotze en el giro antipsicologista de Husserl a mediados de la década de 1890. La cuarta sección es un comentario al manuscrito de Husserl titulado "Microcosmos", al cual se refiere explícitamente en sus Prolegómenos, y que planeaba publicar como anexo a sus Investigaciones lógicas. Esta obra contiene un análisis detallado del tercer volumen de la Lógica de Lotze de 1874. La última sección examina los argumentos de Husserl contra el psicologismo lógico en sus Prolegómenos, que yo expongo a través del prisma de la crítica de Stumpf al psicologismo en su artículo "Psicología y teoría del conocimiento". Sostengo que las primeras obras de Stumpf sobre este asunto hacen posible establecer una conexión entre la interpretación de Lotze de la teoría de las Ideas de Platón y el antipsicologismo de Husserl. Mi hipótesis es que los análisis de Stumpf representan el fondo de la crítica de Husserl al psicologismo lógico en sus Investigaciones lógicas. Concluiré este estudio mostrando que la posición de Husserl respecto de la filosofía de Lotze permanece básicamente la misma después de la publicación de sus Investigaciones lógicas, y que la principal crítica de Husserl a Lotze se refiere, en un último análisis, a la ausencia de una teoría de la intencionalidad en la filosofía de Lotze. (shrink)

Commentaires sur le débat nativisme-empirisme au XIXe siècle et la théorie des signes locaux de Lotze.

Stobaeus records a placitum where Empedocles says that the world is destroyed by the domination in turn of Love and of Strife. The placitum makes perfectly good sense in the context of Empedocles' belief that Love and Strife produce, in turn, a non-cosmic state of total unity (Love) and of total separation (Strife). But for over two hundred years scholars have been unable to hear that simple message. Sturz (1805) emended the text so as to make it fit the non-cyclical (...) interpretation of Empedocles that he had taken over from the pages of Tiedemann (1791). When Diels included Stobaeus' text in his edition of Aetius, in the "Doxographi graeci" (1879), he failed to remove the emendation, although his own reconstruction of the chapter heading in Aetius made the emendation impossible. Twenty years later, Diels saw the light, and printed Stobaeus' placitum, unemended, in his "Poetarum philosophorum fragmenta" (1901) and in successive editions of his "Fragmente der Vorsokratiker" (from 1903 onwards). But Kranz resurrected the emendation in the "Nachträge" to his sixth edition of the "Fragmente der Vorsokratiker" (1951). The emended placitum is used again by Uvo Hölscher (1965) to support a non-cyclical interpretation of Empedocles and is repeated in the latest collection of the fragments and testimonia (Brad Inwood, 1992). Hölscher fails to appreciate that the text that he uses to support his reconstruction is merely Sturz's translation into Greek of the non-cyclical interpretation of Empedocles proposed by Tiedemann at the end of the eighteenth century. (shrink)

By the end of the seventeenth century, high culture had banished astrology as a mixture of superstition and imposture. The great astrological treatises of the past - in particular the Ptolemaic Tetrabiblos (whose very authenticity was cast into doubt) - stopped being published; a hodgepodge of minor writings, mostly preserved in manuscript form, lay mouldering in oblivion in the far recesses of libraries. It was only in the latter decades of the eighteenth century that the learned world began once again (...) to pay attention to the ancient art, when historians of ancient religions and science began to realize the impossibility of exploring their subjects without taking into account a presence that could be neither denied nor underestimated. The history of astrology then began to take shape as a specific field of study, and historicophilological research was able to employ it as a tool for penetrating the tie between mythos and logos, at the origin of western civilization. Along with the image of the Greek miracle, an overly simplistic and schematic definition of reason and science began to decline. It was necessary to isolate, as Hermann Usener sought to do, the “wild germ of science” and to acknowledge the fact that logic and magic bloom on the same stem, as Aby Warburg has often reminded us, with reference to Jean Paul. (shrink)

Is Aquinas’s Sententia libri Ethicorum to be classified as a theological or philosophical commentary? In embracing the latter answer, Doig promotes Hermann Kleber’s view that Aquinas, in the SLE and other Aristotelian commentaries, searches for the “intentio Aristotelis, while keeping in mind the veritas rei”, a truth that, if it is reached through a demonstration that does not incorporate any premise formally based on Christian faith, Doig unhesitatingly calls “philosophical reasoning”. Although R. A. Gauthier dates the SLE 1271–72, Doig (...) argues that it was written after both parts, and was not, therefore, “preparatory to the ‘moral part’ of the Summa [theologiae, ]”. Instead, Doig argues that Aquinas, in the SLE, presents a different genus of moral science: his own philosophical “vision of correct moral philosophy”, that is a personally reworked version of Aristotle. (shrink)

The neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen is famously anti-empiricist in that he denies that sensations can make a definable contribution to knowledge. However, in the second edition of Kant’s Theory of Experience (1885), Cohen considers a proposition that contrasts with both his other work and that of his followers: a Kantian who studies scientific claims to truth—and the grounds on which they are made—cannot limit himself to studying mathematics and logical principles, but needs to also investigate underlying presuppositions about the empirical (...) element of science. Due to his subjectivist approach, Cohen argues, Kant not only failed to explain how scientific observation and experiments are possible, but also misconceived the role of the ideas, particularly the idea of a system of nature. (shrink)

Grappling with the place of Jewish philosophy at the margin of religious studies, Robert Erlewine examines the work of five Jewish philosophers—Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Joseph Soloveitchik—to bring them into dialogue within the discipline. Emphasizing the tenuous place of Jews in European, and particularly German, culture, Erlewine unapologetically contextualizes Jewish philosophy as part of the West. He teases out the antagonistic and overlapping attempts of Jewish thinkers to elucidate the philosophical and cultural meaning (...) of Judaism when others sought to deny and even expel Jewish influences. By reading the canon of Jewish philosophy in this new light, Erlewine offers insight into how Jewish thinkers used religion to assert their individuality and modernity. (shrink)

Hermann von Helmholtz’s work on perceptual science had a fundamental impact on Neo-Kantian movements in the late nineteenth century, and his influence continues to be felt in psychology and analytic philosophy of perception. As is widely acknowledged, Helmholtz denied that we can perceive mind-independent properties of external objects, a view I label Ignorance. Given his commitment to Ignorance, Helmholtz might seem to be committed to a subjectivism according to which we only perceive properties of our own representations. Against this, (...) I argue that for Helmholtz, the properties we perceive are not monadic properties of either the subject or the object. Rather, Helmholtz endorsed a relationalism about the properties we perceive: the properties of objects we perceive are all relational properties. I then suggest that once we take into account oft-neglected terminological distinctions in Helmholtz’s corpus, we are better able to make sense of his commitment to relationalism. (shrink)

Hermann Cohen’s early interpretation of Kant’s theory of freedom anticipates contemporary interpretations in denying that freedom signifies a literal metaphysical power. Cohen would have been critical, however, of the view popular among contemporary Kantians that the concept of autonomy can be justified by a direct appeal to the standpoint of the one who exercises and evaluates conscious moral choices. Cohen rejects Kant’s own strategy of appealing to the moral law as a “revelation” of freedom, undertaking a strictly transcendental derivation (...) of both freedom and morality. Cohen’s own attempt to ground freedom and morality in a set of purely transcendental refl ections is a failure, but understanding the reasons for this failure enables us to draw important conclusions about the alleged priority of the value of autonomy in the normative domain, and hence about the contemporary viability of Kantian positions in the field of ethics. (shrink)

Outlines of Metaphysic - dictated portions of the lectures of Hermann Lotze is an unchanged, high-quality reprint of the original edition of 1884. Hansebooks is editor of the literature on different topic areas such as research and science, travel and expeditions, cooking and nutrition, medicine, and other genres. As a publisher we focus on the preservation of historical literature. Many works of historical writers and scientists are available today as antiques only. Hansebooks newly publishes these books and contributes to (...) the preservation of literature which has become rare and historical knowledge for the future. (shrink)

ONE OF THE MOST prominent theorists of anarcho-capitalism is Hans- Hermann Hoppe. In what is perhaps his most famous result, the argumentation ethic for libertarianism, he purports to establish an a priori defense of the justice of a social order based exclusively on pri- vate property. Hoppe claims that all participants in a debate must presuppose the libertarian principle that every person owns himself, since the principle underlies the very concept of argumentation. Some libertarians (e.g., Rothbard 1988) have celebrated (...) Hoppe’s argument as the final nail in the coffin for collectivism of any type; following Hoppe, they believe that to deny the libertarian ethic is not only wrong, but also internally contradictory. On the other hand, a number of other prominent libertarians characterized Hoppe’s initial statement of his case as “one muddle after another” (Steele 1988, p. 47) or “a tissue of bald assertions” (Yeager 1988, p. 45). (shrink)

Tschumi believes that the quality of architecture depends on the theoretical factor it contains. Such a view led to the creation of architecture that would achieve visibility and comprehensibility only after its interpretation. On his way to creating such an architecture he took on a purely philosophical reflection on the basic building block of architecture, which is space. In 1975, he wrote an essay entitled Questions of Space, in which he included several dozen questions about the nature of space. The (...) questions he formulated could be regarded as analogous to the situation in the philosophy of the time, in which the interest in questioning the most obvious forms of understanding the world and intellectual categories increased. The research on space is an area common to many fields of natural sciences, humanities and artistic creation, but it also deals with other problems, such as issues of experience. The concept of space-time continuum proposed by Hermann Minkowski drew attention to the identity of time and space with the events taking place. Probably regardless of the postulates of physicists commenting on Einstein’s discoveries, also in philosophy it increased the importance of the concept of the event which became dominant in Heidegger’s latest work Contributions of Philosophy. Of the event. Furthermore, Tschumi’s reflections on space entered into relation with the problem of experience, which aroused the interest of a group of French philosophers trying to assimilate Georges Bataille’s concept of “inner experience”. Both Tschumi and Derrida referred to Bataille because his views could be used not only to modify the concept of the subject, but also to change the understanding of what constitutes the area of architecture. The discussion on experience has led to the recognition that the subject is not sovereign, but actually a form of what is on their outside. Such insights make it possible to treat the area of the Parc de La Villette as existing mainly when it is organised by its users. The decisive features of the Park are its assumptions, according to which it is a variety of active void that leads to agreeing new social relations with it. The park does not force to participate in already existing moral or political communities, but tries to move into an unknown future in which the scope of free functioning of individuals will be increased. Doubts about the principles of functioning of the individual self and its discovery as a whole composed of non-coherent parts, as well as its dependence on its own depth full of disordered forces, influenced the understanding of architecture as a set of contradictions whose source is a fundamental void anticipating the empty phenomenal space. The use of this phenomenal void in architecture, as well as the rejection of the whole and unity, had a specific political purpose and drew its inspiration from political analyses. In the Parc de La Villette, metaphysics and politics were brought closer together because the philosophy of void was used to create new conditions for community action. It can be argued that the source of this philosophy was the perception of errors in existing societies dependent on the shortcomings of traditional metaphysics. Spacing (espacement) was one of the key terms in Derrida’s philosophy, which was also combined with the concepts of différance and chôra. The study of the nature of space, especially its transition from the level of pure possibility to the level of sensual phenomenon, also contributes to understanding how well designed space can have an impact on its audience. This explanation is based on Tschumi’s assumption that the space of the Parc de La Villette contradicts the integrating approaches and instead exposes contradictions, but it does so in a way that combines incompatible properties into a single piece of architecture. The specificity of such integration is similar to the invention of a musical phrase, which is an ideological message: moral and political. Such a thesis may raise doubts, however, if both the clearly adopted assumptions and those deduced from the work allow for their ↪Quart Nr 2(52)/2019 logically ordered presentation then to a limited extent it may be assumed that the work has achieved a connection between a specific philosophy of space and its practical application. Derrida combined the problem of spatiality with the problem of transcendental imagination in Kant’s philosophy, who in the first version of Critique of Pure Reason assumed that pure imagination precedes the appearance of time and space, even in their transcendental forms. The imagination in such a situation can be described as a factor activating time and space, which indicates what function is played by movement in this activity. This leads us to recognize that the ultra originary source of pure forms of sensual intuition is movement, which in early Greek philosophy was identified with void and its lack of resistance to phenomena occurring in it. Derrida’s philosophy in search of a certain super-transcendental source of time and space pointed to différance which, like void or the chôra, does not have material features or even any other form of being. Différance is the primary cause of the disruption of motionlessness and the introduction of activity into motionless time and space, thus its activity can be described as spacing (espacement). Derrida’s discoveries in this respect are not entirely original, because Hegel already pointed out when examining the present that it is primarily a differential relation (differente Beziehung), which, being seemingly neutral, influences the present with supernatural force and makes it unidentifiable with itself. Differente Beziehung must similarly influence the originary space, negating its initial character by multiplying its divisions and expanding its boundaries. Différance acts by revealing contradictions wherever there is apparent undifferentiation. Tschumi, composing the Parc de La Villette as a variety of void and a set of incompatible layers, followed the rules of différance or the chôra: he made void visible together with its saturation with contradictions. If space can be considered to be the result of the activity of difference, such activity has a certain regularity, which influences the behaviour of its observers. Differences or contradictions fall into a certain rhythm, which can be considered a manifestation of transcendent order. The problem is that what can be considered the source of such order, namely the logos or God, is partly disorder and error. According to descriptions contained in Timaeus, the world is a combination of forces that drive to order with forces of erroneous necessity that resounds in every order and forces it to return to disorder. Derrida denied the possibility of understanding différance as a theological value, even if it were a negative or apophatic theology, but no categorical denial could be perfect. The assumption that différance or the chôra are not endowed with any substance properties cannot deny their activity, and thus a certain force. Already since Democritus, philosophy has multiplied the names of such a force and the contradictory variety of its manifestations, never forgetting also the necessity for reason to withdraw from the possibility of giving its correct characteristics. Such a withdrawal may be interpreted as an expression of respect and, in certain situations, as a cult of the force that precedes reasonableness. The Parc de La Villette, which is an artistic divagation about the contradictions and forces behind them, can be considered as a place of their sublimation, and therefore as a variation of the temple of what differs from order and disorder. (shrink)

I argue that Immanuel Kant's critical philosophy—in particular the doctrine of transcendental idealism which grounds it—is best understood as an `epistemic' or `metaphilosophical' doctrine. As such it aims to show how one may engage in the natural sciences and in metaphysics under the restriction that certain conditions are imposed on our cognition of objects. Underlying Kant's doctrine, however, is an ontological posit, of a sort, regarding the fundamental nature of our cognition. This posit, sometimes called the `discursivity thesis', while considered (...) to be completely obvious and uncontroversial by some, has nevertheless been denied by thinkers both before and after Kant. One such thinker is Jakob Friedrich Fries, an early neo-Kantian thinker who, despite his rejection of discursivity, also advocated for a metaphilosophical understanding of critical philosophy. As I will explain, a consequence for Fries of the denial of discursivity is a radical reconceptualisation of the method of critical philosophy; whereas this method is a priori for Kant, for Fries it is in general empirical. I discuss these issues in the context of quantum theory, and I focus in particular on the views of the physicist Niels Bohr and the Neo-Friesian philosopher Grete Hermann. I argue that Bohr's understanding of quantum mechanics can be seen as a natural extension of an orthodox Kantian viewpoint in the face of the challenges posed by quantum theory, and I compare this with the extension of Friesian philosophy that is represented by Hermann's view. -/- A shorter version of this paper, focusing specifically on the views of Grete Hermann, has been published as: Cuffaro, Michael (2023). Grete Hermann, Quantum Mechanics, and the Evolution of Kantian Philosophy. In Jeanne Peijnenburg & Sander Verhaegh (eds.), Women in the History of Analytic Philosophy. Cham: Springer. pp. 114-145. (shrink)

This paper examines the claim that the two final articles of Rav Kook’s book Ikvei Hatzon were written as a response to a lecture given by Hermann Cohen. It first reviews Cohen’s lecture showing that, regarding the concept of God, Cohen argues for the compatibility of Judaism and Kantianism in denying the dogmatic-mythological preoccupation with the existence of God in favor of understanding God as the basis of morality. Second, it analyzes Kook’s articles, demonstrating that he accepts the compatibility (...) of Judaism and Kantianism together with the denial of the dogmatic relation to God as a substance. Nevertheless, Kook is not satisfied with the critical view that denies the dogmatic relation to the substance altogether, since it formulates a merely negative relationship with God. Instead, he develops his concept of the Divine Ideals, which synthesizes the dogmatic preoccupation with substantiality and the critical denial of it. The Divine Ideals are the moral progression of man, through which man gradually becomes identical to God. Within the Divine Ideals, dogmatism becomes an emotional striving to be identical with God as a substance, while criticism is the intellectual negation of the possibility of such identity, which ensures that the process will continue indefinitely. (shrink)

I. Introduction In Groundwork III and in the Critique of Practical Reason Kant famously asserted that “Freiheit und unbedingtes praktisches Gesetz weisen […] wechselsweise auf einander zurück.” Kant's thesis of the analyticity of freedom and practical reason was rejected by his prominent early readers. In the eighth of his influential Letters on Kant's Philosophy of 1786–1787, Karl Leonhard Reinhold argued that the identification of the will with practical reason excluded the possibility of ascribing freedom to immoral and amoral actions. Reinhold (...) proposed that free will consequently be defined in libertarian terms, as the free capacity to satisfy one of two fundamental drives at the expense of the other: either ‘den uneigennützigen Trieb’ equivalent to Kant's ‘Triebfeder der reinen praktischen Vernunft’, or ‘den eigennützigen Trieb’ equivalent to Kant's ‘Begierde und Neigungen’ or ‘Eigenliebe’. Most first-generation commentators followed Reinhold in rejecting Kant's assertion of an analytical relationship between freedom and practical reason, but several came out on the other side, denying freedom in order to secure the identity of will and practical reason. Leonhard Creuzer thus concurred with Reinhold that immoral conduct could not be imputed to the causality of pure reason, or by extension, to the rational agent, but then developed a theory of “transcendental fatalism” according to which immoral actions were the effects of forces from the realm of nature intervening upon, and outweighing, the force of the intelligible ground. Nearly a century later, Hermann Cohen dismissed libertarian freedom as incoherent in itself and as incompatible with autonomy. Across the channel Henry Sidgwick withheld judgment on the coherence of libertarian freedom, but he, too, claimed that such freedom is, at all events, incompatible with the causality of practical reason. More recently, Gerold Prauss has suggested that the perennial difficulties posed by Kant's account of the relationship between freedom and practical reason might be resolved by construing the relationship as a synthetic rather than analytic one. This view has found supporters across the Atlantic. (shrink)

This article explores a rarely acknowledged and all too often specifically denied possibility: the relevance of Hegel’s philosophy to the interpretation of the literary work of Hermann Hesse. Contemporary Hesse scholars critical of this position, such as Edmund Gnefkow, Martin Pfeifer, and Mark Boulby, tend to view Hegel primarily as a rigorously rationalist philosopher of history. Thus they perpetuate a myth which has long been abandoned by the mainstream of Hegelian scholarship and should have been permanently laid to rest (...) by Iwan Iljin in Die Philosophie Hegels als kontemplative Gotteslehre when he presented convincing evidence for considering Hegel as an “intuitively-rational clairvoyant”. (shrink)

Was the emperor as sovereign allowed to seize the property of his subjects? Was this handled differently in late medieval Roman law and in the practice and theory of zabt in Mughal India? How is political sovereignty relating to the church's powers and to trade? How about maritime sovereignty after Grotius? How was the East India Company as a 'corporation' interacting with an Indian Nawab? How was the Shogunate and the emperor negotiating 'sovereignty' in early modern Japan? The volume addresses (...) such questions through thoroughly researched historical case studies, covering the disciplines of History, Political Sciences, and Law. Contributors include: Kenneth Pennington, Fabrice Micallef, Philippe Denis, Sylvio Hermann De Franceschi, Joshua Freed, David Dyzenhaus, Michael P. Breen, Daniel Lee, Andrew Fitzmaurice and Kajo Kubala, Nicholas Abbott, Tiraana Bains, Cornel Zwierlein, Mark Ravina. (shrink)

The non-clerical („unpfäffisch“) Schleiermacher. Karl Glutzkow and the Schleiermacher image of Young Germany. Towards a construction of a countermyth. After Friedrich Schleiermacher’s death on February 12, 1834, his disciples and his family endeavoured to idealize him as an exemplary figure of the church by publishing a complete edition of his published and unpublished works as well as a selection from his letters. (1) Schleiermacher’s Christian death („christliche Euthanasie“). This endeveaour began with the sermons delivered at the funeral and the notes (...) of his wife, Henriette Schleiermacher, about his pious death. (2) Gutzkow’s obituary in the „Allgemeine Zeitung“. The journalist Gutzkow in particular protested against this portrayal in an obituary in which the old Schleiermacher was declared to have been senile and without substantial importance for the present time. On the other hand, an image of the young Schleiermacher, the friend of the Romantics, was to be preserved for the younger generation. (3) The replies of Schleiermacher’s disciples. A forthright reply to Gutzkow’s obituary appeared in the same journal. His view was contradicted by means of an extensive biographical sketch by Friedrich Lücke, one of Schleiermacher’s disciples. (4) Gutzkow’s publication of „Schleiermacher’s Vertraute Briefe über Friedrich Schlegels Lucinde“. Gutzkow supported his view with a new edition of Schleiermacher’s early work, to which he added a provocative preface. As a result, the edition was banned. (5) Abuse of Schleiermacher or a gallant service to him? The reception of the „Vertraute Briefe“. The reactions were divided between considering the work as an early youthful indiscretion of Schleiermacher, and the idea of an intellectual identity running through Schleiermacher’s whole life. The other authors of Young German aligned themselves with Gutzkow. (6) The end of the myth of Schleiermacher: Gutzkow’s „Wally. Die Zweiflerin“. This novel, which derives the protagonist’s suicide from his religious doubts, caused the literary movement Young Germany to be banned in all of Germany, and also led to the imprisonment of the author. In the novel itself, Schleiermacher’s role is rather minor. Later on, Gutzkow did not renew the image of an non-clerical Schleiermacher. – I shall also re-edit a conventional obituary, Gutzkow’s obituary as well as an anonymous reply in the Allgemeine Zeitung (Augsburg). (shrink)

We distinguish dynamical and statistical interpretations of evolutionary theory. We argue that only the statistical interpretation preserves the presumed relation between natural selection and drift. On these grounds we claim that the dynamical conception of evolutionary theory as a theory of forces is mistaken. Selection and drift are not forces. Nor do selection and drift explanations appeal to the (sub-population-level) causes of population level change. Instead they explain by appeal to the statistical structure of populations. We briefly discuss the implications (...) of the statistical interpretation of selection for various debates within the philosophy of biologythe `explananda of selection' debate and the `units of selection' debate. (shrink)

The Modern Synthesis has dominated biology for 80 years. It was formulated in 1942, a decade before the major achievements of molecular biology, including the Double Helix and the Central Dogma. When first formulated in the 1950s these discoveries and concepts seemed initially to completely justify the central genetic assumptions of the Modern Synthesis. The Double Helix provided the basis for highly accurate DNA replication, while the Central Dogma was viewed as supporting the Weismann Barrier, so excluding the inheritance of (...) acquired characteristics. This article examines the language of the Modern Synthesis and reveals that it is based on four important misinterpretations of what molecular biology had shown, so forming the basis of the four Illusions: 1. Natural Selection; 2. The Weismann Barrier; 3. The Rejection of Darwin’s Gemmules; 4. The Central Dogma. A multi-level organisation view of biology avoids these illusions through the principle of biological relativity. Molecular biology does not therefore confirm the assumptions of the Modern Synthesis. (shrink)

There are two competing interpretations of the modern synthesis theory of evolution: the dynamical (also know as ‘traditional’) and the statistical. The dynamical interpretation maintains that explanations offered under the auspices of the modern synthesis theory articulate the causes of evolution. It interprets selection and drift as causes of population change. The statistical interpretation holds that modern synthesis explanations merely cite the statistical structure of populations. This paper offers a defense of statisticalism. It argues that a change in trait frequencies (...) in a population can be attributed only to selection or drift against the background of a particular statistical description of the population. The traditionalist supposition that selection and drift are description‐independent causes of population change leads the dynamical interpretation into a dilemma: it must face a contradiction or accept the loss of explanatory power. (shrink)

Sehr verehrter Herr Professor! Ihrem Buch über die Prinzipien der Quantenmechanik verdanke ich das Verständnis für die Geschlossenheit und Schönheit dieser Theorie, einer Schönheit, die, wie mir scheint, in der abstrakt symbolischen Art Ihrer Darstellung überhaupt erst richtig zur Geltung kommt. Die starken Anregungen, die ich von Ihnen erhalten habe und für die ich Ihnen dankbar bin, haben zugleich in mir den Wunsch geweckt, Ihre Meinung über einige Gedankengänge kennen zu lernen, die sich mir beim Studium der Quantenmechanik mehr und (...) mehr aufgedrängt haben. (shrink)

Lieber Herr Weizsäcker! Wo Sie sich jetzt zur Zeit der Semesterferien aufhalten, weiss ich zwar nicht. Aber ich hoffe, dass Ihnen von Ihrer Leipziger Wohnung Post nachgeschickt wird und dass Ihre Leipziger Adresse noch die alte ist, die ich vom Sommer her kenne. Immerhin sind das einige Unsicherheitsfaktoren und ich bitte Sie daher, mir eine Postkarte zu schreiben, wenn dieser Brief Sie erreicht und Sie nicht gleich dazu kommen, auf meine physikalischen Fragen einzugehen.

Erlauben Sie bitte, dass ich Ihnen, mit Hilfe eines Durchschlags, beiden gemeinsam für den Brief von Herrn Scholz und die von ihm mir übersandte Arbeit von Herrn Kratzer danke. Ich habe die Arbeit mit grossem Interesse gelesen – auf einige inhaltliche Schwierigkeiten, die sie mir macht, will ich nachher noch eingehen –, und fände es sehr schön, wenn diese Überlegungen zu den Einstein-Schrödingerschen Bedenken im September in unserem Kreis diskutiert werden. Ich danke Ihnen, Herr Kratzer, also herzlich für Ihre Bereitschaft, (...) ein Referat für unsere Tagung zu übernehmen, und bitte Sie, mir möglichst bald und möglichst genau mitzuteilen, wie Sie Ihr Thema formulieren möchten. (shrink)

According to Aristotelian essentialism, the nature of an organism is constituted of a particular goal-directed disposition to produce an organism typical of its kind. This paper argues—against the prevailing orthodoxy—that essentialism of this sort is indispensable to evolutionary biology. The most powerful anti-essentialist arguments purport to show that the natures of organisms play no explanatory role in modern synthesis biology. I argue that recent evolutionary developmental biology provides compelling evidence to the contrary. Developmental biology shows that one must appeal to (...) the capacities of organisms to explain what makes adaptive evolution adaptive. Moreover, the specific capacities in question are precisely those that, according to Aristotle, constitute the nature of an organism. Essentialism 1.1 Aristotelian biological kinds Evolutionary anti-essentialism 2.1 Taxonomic anti-essentialism 2.2 Explanatory anti-essentialism Adaptation 3.1 Stability 3.2 Mutability 3.3 Phenotypic plasticity and adaptive evolution The natures of organisms Conclusion. (shrink)

There has recently been much interest in the role of attention in controlling action. The role has been mischaracterized as an element in necessary and sufficient conditions on agential control. In this paper I attempt a new characterization of the role. I argue that we need to understand attentional control in order to fully understand agential control. To fully understand agential control we must understand paradigm exercises of agential control. Three important accounts of agential control—intentional, reflective, and goal-represented control—do not (...) fully explain such exercises. I argue that understanding them requires understanding how deployments of visual attention implement flexible occurrent control, or a capacity to flexibly adjust the degree of control that individuals exercise over their actions. While such deployments of attention are neither necessary nor sufficient for exercising agential control, they constitute an attentional skill for controlling action, understanding which is central to fully understanding agential control. We can appreciate its centrality if we appreciate that this attentional skill for controlling action is plausibly crucial to acting non-negligently. (shrink)

The concept of the environment appears to be indispensably involved in adaptive explanation. Quite what its role is, however, is a matter of some dispute. The environment is customarily viewed as the dual of the organism; a wholly external, discrete, autonomous cause of evolution. On this view, the external environment is the principal cause of the adaptedness of form, and the determinant of what it is to be an adaptation. I argue that this conception of the environment neither adequately explains (...) nor individuates evolutionary adaptations. Instead, adaptation, properly construed, is an evolutionary response to affordances. The environment, traditionally construed, underdetermines an organism’s affordances. Instead, I argue that the environment takes its place in evolutionary models not as a discrete causal entity, but as an abstraction. (shrink)

We review recent developments in ethical pluralism, ethical particularism, Kantian intuitionism, rights theory, and climate change ethics, and show the relevance of these developments in ethical theory to contemporary business ethics. This paper explains why pluralists think that ethical decisions should be guided by multiple standards and why particularists emphasize the crucial role of context in determining sound moral judgments. We explain why Kantian intuitionism emphasizes the discerning power of intuitive reason and seek to integrate that with the comprehensiveness of (...) Kant’s moral framework. And we show how human rights can be grounded in human agency, and explain the connections between human rights and climate change. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest among philosophers of memory in the questions of how to characterize and to account for the temporal phenomenology of episodic memory. One prominent suggestion has been that episodic memory involves a feeling of pastness, the elaboration of which has given rise to two main approaches. On the intentionalist approach, the feeling of pastness is explained in terms of what episodic memory represents. In particular, Fernández has argued that it can be explained (...) in terms of memory representing itself as being caused by a past perceptual experience. On the metacognitive approach, which we have recently developed in, the feeling of pastness results from the monitoring and interpretation of the processing features of episodic remembering. In this paper, we show that the metacognitive approach should be preferred over the intentionalist approach. We argue that intentionalism, and Fernández’ causal self-referential view in particular, ultimately fail as accounts of the feeling of pastness. The difficulties faced by intentionalism allows us to single out three constraints that any satisfactory account of the temporal phenomenology of episodic remembering needs to meet. We conclude by arguing that the metacognitive view satisfies those constraints in a neat way, and as such, that it should be preferred over intentionalism. (shrink)

In this study, I will first introduce Husserl’s analysis in Studien zur Struktur des Bewußtseins by emphasizing the reasons that motivate these analyses on descriptive psychology and their status in Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology in the late Freiburg period. I will then focus on the structure of acts, with particular emphasis on three aspects stressed by Husserl in Studien: intentionality, the taxonomy of acts, and Brentano’s principle of the Vorstellungsgrundlage. The last three parts of this study outline the characteristic features of (...) three fundamental aspects of affective life in Husserl’s phenomenology: emotions, sense feelings, and moods. I will conclude with some general remarks on the status of affects and values in Husserl’s phenomenology. (shrink)

Accompanied by facing-page Italian and explanatory notes, a stunning new translation, using modern American English, of the great poetic masterpiece maintains Dante's original triple rhyme scheme, brilliantly and beautifully recreating Inferno in all its glory.

ABSTRACT:Little theoretical attention has been paid to the question of what obligations corporations and other business enterprises have to the four billion people living at the base of the global economic pyramid. This article makes several theoretical contributions to this topic. First, it is argued that corporations are properly understood as agents of global justice. Second, the legitimacy of global governance institutions and the legitimacy of corporations and other business enterprises are distinguished. Third, it is argued that a deliberative democracy (...) model of corporate legitimacy defended by theorists of political CSR is unsatisfactory. Fourth, it is argued that a Rawlsian theoretical framework fails to provide a satisfactory account of the obligations of corporations regarding global justice. Finally, an ethical conception of CSR grounded in an appropriately modest set of duties tied to corporate relationships is then defended. This position is cosmopolitan in scope and grounded in overlapping arguments for human rights. (shrink)

In This Paper, I Identify a Problem, which the project that I will refer to as the ‘Being and Time Project’ (or ‘BTP’ for short) aimed to solve; this is the project within which Heidegger reinterpreted his early thought—and which he unsuccessfully attempted to bring to fruition—in, roughly speaking, the years 1925–28. The problem in question presents several faces: viewed from one angle, it concerns the unity of the concept of “Being in general,” from another, the integrity of the notion (...) of “Dasein,” and from another, the possibility of the perspective from which the philosopher does her work. The solution that the BTP would have offered turns on the claim that time is “the possible horizon for any understanding .. (shrink)

We investigate the complexity of various combinatorial theorems about linear and partial orders, from the points of view of computability theory and reverse mathematics. We focus in particular on the principles ADS (Ascending or Descending Sequence), which states that every infinite linear order has either an infinite descending sequence or an infinite ascending sequence, and CAC (Chain-AntiChain), which states that every infinite partial order has either an infinite chain or an infinite antichain. It is well-known that Ramsey's Theorem for pairs (...) (RT₂²) splits into a stable version (SRT₂²) and a cohesive principle (COH). We show that the same is true of ADS and CAC, and that in their cases the stable versions are strictly weaker than the full ones (which is not known to be the case for RT₂² and SRT₂²). We also analyze the relationships between these principles and other systems and principles previously studied by reverse mathematics, such as WKL₀, DNR, and BΣ₂. We show, for instance, that WKL₀ is incomparable with all of the systems we study. We also prove computability-theoretic and conservation results for them. Among these results are a strengthening of the fact, proved by Cholak, Jockusch, and Slaman, that COH is Π₁¹-conservative over the base system RCA₀. We also prove that CAC does not imply DNR which, combined with a recent result of Hirschfeldt, Jockusch, Kjos-Hanssen, Lempp, and Slaman, shows that CAC does not imply SRT₂² (and so does not imply RT₂²). This answers a question of Cholak, Jockusch, and Slaman. Our proofs suggest that the essential distinction between ADS and CAC on the one hand and RT₂² on the other is that the colorings needed for our analysis are in some way transitive. We formalize this intuition as the notions of transitive and semitransitive colorings and show that the existence of homogeneous sets for such colorings is equivalent to ADS and CAC, respectively. We finish with several open questions. (shrink)