Vorliegende Denkschrift thematisiert - in Entsprechung zum multiperspektivisch angelegten Lebenswerk Alwin Diemers - die Rolle der Philosophie in ihrem Verhältnis zu und in ihrer Bedeutung für die anderen Bereiche der Wissenschaft, die Kunst, die Gesellschaft und die Weltanschauung mittels sehr divergierender, aber letztlich doch zu einem facettenhaft zusammengefügten Komplex beitragender Abhandlungen internationaler Wissenschaftler und Autoren.

It is an assumption common to many theories of rationality that all practical reasons are based on a person's given desires. I shall call any approach to practical reasons which accepts this assumption a "Humean approach". In spite of many criticisms, the Humean approach has numerous followers who take it to be the natural and inevitable view of practical reason. I will develop an argument against the Humean view aiming to explain its appeal, as well as to expose its mistake. (...) I focus on just one argument in favour of the Humean approach, which I believe can be constructed as the background idea of many Humean accounts: the argument from motivation. (shrink)

The buck-passing account of values offers an explanation of the close relation of values and reasons for action: of why it is that the question whether something that is of value provides reasons is not ”open.” Being of value simply is, its defenders claim, a property that something has in virtue of its having other reason-providing properties. The generic idea of buck-passing is that the property of being good or being of value does not provide reasons. It is other properties (...) that do. There are, however, at least three versions of the account which differ in their understanding of those “other properties.” The first two versions both assume that non-normative properties provide reasons, the difference being that the second allows that normative properties also provide reasons. Both run into difficulties, which I explain, in trying to defend the claim that non-normative properties provide reasons for action. The third version of the buck-passing account which explains being of value in terms of more specific evaluative properties that are reason-providing remains unpersuasive as well. Once we understand the relation between general and specific properties as a difference in degree, there is no space for a reduction of the one kind of properties to the other. In section II I sketch an alternative account of the relation between reasons and values, which is based on a thesis that I call the Conceptual Link and the claim that values are not just co-extensive with reasons, but explain them. (shrink)

We characterize the epimorphisms in homotopy type theory (HoTT) as the fiberwise acyclic maps and develop a type-theoretic treatment of acyclic maps and types in the context of synthetic homotopy theory as developed in univalent foundations. We present examples and applications in group theory, such as the acyclicity of the Higman group, through the identification of groups with 0-connected, pointed 1-types. Many of our results are formalized as part of the agda-unimath library.

Among various changing views on sex and gender, transsexualism, theoretically as well as clinically, raises a paradoxical issue: transsexual subjects seem to confirm something that they simultaneously disclaim or, at least, destabilize with their transition. These days psychoanalysis remains rather critical towards transsexualism. Jacques Lacan has developed several theories on sex and gender, reworking them during the course of his lifetime. That is why his work includes possibilities of understanding transsexual phenomena at the level of singular solutions that he himself, (...) especially with respect to some of his earlier cases, has not been able to formulate. (shrink)

Our paper addresses the question of what exactly the contribution of the humanities to management education could or should be, suggesting the concept of Literacy as both this contribution’s goal and method. Though there seems to emerge a consensus in the debate about the future of management education that the humanities should be involved with shaping it, some misconceptions about the humanities obscure the understanding of the why and how of it, most notably as to the manner in which they (...) are to provide for ethical values. Our paper in a first step endeavours to clear those misconceptions up drawing on some historical aspects of their development. It then proceeds to introducing the concept of Literacy and, based on it, the teaching framework of Critical Management Literacy we designed to operationalize the concept towards management students` needs. Our leading hypothesis is that the contribution of the humanities should focus on the cultivation of the capacity for epistemological doubt in order to prepare students for the complexity and indeterminacy of reality, thus at the same time laying the groundwork for ethical reflectivity. (shrink)

One of the most striking features of is the detail with which behavior on logical reasoning tasks can now be predicted and explained. This detail is surprising, given the state of the field 10 to 15 years ago, and it has been brought about by a theoretical program that largely ignores consideration of cognitive processes, that is, any kind of internal behavior that generates overt responding. It seems that an increase in explanatory power can be achieved by restricting a psychological (...) theory. (shrink)

Zwischen 1920 und 1925 kam es nach Vorarbeiten von Jones, Abraham, Stärcke, van Ophuijsen und Alexander sowie in Abrahams Hauptwerk, dem Versuch einer Entwicklungsgeschichte der Libido, zu einer Veränderung der psychoanalytischen Theorie, die sich vor allem auf die Stellung der Aggression bezog. Die stärkere Gewichtung der präödipalen Aggression wurde in London in erster Linie von Abrahams Analysanden James und Edward Glover durchgeführt. Ihre Arbeiten bereiteten den Boden für die Rezeption von Melanie Klein, einer weiteren Abraham-Analysandin, die ihrerseits von Alix Strachey, (...) auch sie eine Analysandin Abrahams, sowie von Ernest Jones unterstützt wurde. Klein entwickelte in der Analyse mit Kindern eine Technik, die sich bevorzugt auf die Wahrnehmung und Deutung der Aggression in der Stunde bezog. All dies, ohne dass Freud die neue Linie begrüßt hätte, was aber seit dem Erstarken der lokalen Gruppen in Berlin und London nicht mehr so stark ins Gewicht fiel. Gleichwohl blieb die Frage nach der Stellung der Aggression in der Schwebe, während sich Freud bis zuletzt für das Primat des Sexuellen aussprach und sich von den Positionen der hier erwähnten Schüler zwischen 1920 und 1925 mehrere Male ausdrücklich distanzierte. (shrink)

In recent years, the receipt and the perception of information has changed in ways which have fueled fears about the fates of our democracies. However, real information on these possibilities or the direction of these changes does not exist. Into this gap, Hahn and colleagues bring the power of Condorcet's (1785) Jury Theorem to show that changes in our information networks have affected voter inter‐dependence so that it is likely that voters are now collectively more ignorant even if individual voter (...) competence remains unchanged. (shrink)

The notion of “the burden of proof” plays an important role in real-world argumentation contexts, in particular in law. It has also been given a central role in normative accounts of argumentation, and has been used to explain a range of classic argumentation fallacies. We argue that in law the goal is to make practical decisions whereas in critical discussion the goal is frequently simply to increase or decrease degree of belief in a proposition. In the latter case, it is (...) not necessarily important whether that degree of belief exceeds a particular threshold (e.g., ‘reasonable doubt’). We explore the consequences of this distinction for the role that the “burden of proof” has played in argumentation and in theories of fallacy. (shrink)

Recent advances in artificial intelligence offer many beneficial prospects. However, concerns have been raised about the opacity of decisions made by these systems, some of which have turned out to be biased in various ways. This article makes a contribution to a growing body of literature on how to make systems for automated decision-making more transparent, explainable, and fair by drawing attention to and further elaborating a distinction first made by Nozick between first-level bias in the application of standards and (...) second-level bias in the choice of standards, as well as a second distinction between discrimination and arbitrariness. Applying the typology developed, a number of illuminating observations are made. First, it is observed that some reported bias in automated decision-making is first-level arbitrariness, which can be alleviated by explainability techniques. However, such techniques have only a limited potential to alleviate first-level discrimination. Second, it is argued that second-level arbitrariness is probably quite common in automated decision-making. In contrast to first-level arbitrariness, however, second-level arbitrariness is not straightforward to detect automatically. Third, the prospects for alleviating arbitrariness are discussed. It is argued that detecting and alleviating second-level arbitrariness is a profound problem because there are many contrasting and sometimes conflicting standards from which to choose, and even when we make intentional efforts to choose standards for good reasons, some second-level arbitrariness remains. (shrink)

ExcerptWalter Benjamin's famous statement in the eighth of his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” that “the state of [exception] in which we live is not the exception but the rule,”1 has become as normalized as its proposition asserts. Few turns of phrase have become as easily convertible, turning the “special property” (of the definition of a Greek idioma) through collocation into an implicit signified conventionalized by common usage. In the phrases turning on the elements “the exception” and “the rule,” (...) the antonyms are being assimilated to each other, neutralizing their oppositional relation—not as a matter of a mystical “attraction…. (shrink)

Background: Recent research has demonstrated that depressed individuals show impairments in inhibiting irrelevant emotional material, and that these impairments are linked to rumination. Cognitive inhibition, however, is not a unitary construct but consists of several components which operate at different stages of information processing. The present study was designed to assess two components of inhibition and examine their relation to depression and rumination in a sample of clinically depressed and healthy control participants. Methods: Twenty-two individuals diagnosed with a current depressive (...) episode and 27 never-disordered control participants completed an Emotional Flanker Task to assess individual differences in interference control and a modification of the Working Memory Selection Task to assess individual differences in the ability to discard no longer relevant emotional material from working memory. Participants completed self-report measures to assess depressive symptoms and rumination. Results: Clinically depressed compared to control participants showed significantly reduced interference control of irrelevant negative information. The groups, however, did not differ in their ability to discard no longer relevant negative information from working memory. In contrast, rumination was associated with difficulty removing no longer relevant negative material from working memory but not with deficits in interference control. Conclusions: Results highlight the importance of differentiating among components of inhibition to gain a better understanding of cognitive mechanisms underlying depression and rumination. (shrink)

Modern society makes extensive use of automated algorithmic decisions, fueled by advances in artificial intelligence. However, since these systems are not perfect, questions about fairness are increasingly investigated in the literature. In particular, many authors take a Rawlsian approach to algorithmic fairness. This article aims to identify some complications with this approach: Under which circumstances can Rawls’s original position reasonably be applied to algorithmic fairness decisions? First, it is argued that there are important differences between Rawls’s original position and a (...) parallel algorithmic fairness original position with respect to risk attitudes. Second, it is argued that the application of Rawls’s original position to algorithmic fairness faces a boundary problem in defining relevant stakeholders. Third, it is observed that the definition of the least advantaged, necessary for applying the difference principle, requires some attention in the context of algorithmic fairness. Finally, it is argued that appropriate deliberation in algorithmic fairness contexts often require more knowledge about probabilities than the Rawlsian original position allows. Provided that these complications are duly considered, the thought-experiment of the Rawlsian original position can be useful in algorithmic fairness decisions. (shrink)

Luck, Value, and Commitment comprises eleven new essays which engage with, or take their point of departure from, the influential work in moral and political philosophy of Bernard Williams (1929-2003).

This paper underlines the surprising ways in which subject formation, agency and human flourishing emerge in counter discourses. As examples I offer a post-colonial critique of Rosa Parks in the USA and Fayza in the film Cairo 678. Economic and epistemic violence of neo-liberalism, neo-colonialism, racism, fundamentalism, nationalism, classism, sexism, homophobia, speciesism, etc. call for a critique of religion with corresponding answers. For such a project, the analysis brings together the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the post-colonial scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, (...) and questions their notions of religion and gender as well as resistance and representation. Spivak’s critique of capitalism, the post-colonial condition and epistemic violence in terms of gender constructions is seminal. However, her understanding of ‘religion’ remains ambivalent, yet influences post-colonial theologies tremendously. Bonhoeffer is interesting for a de-essentialized understanding of religion in the post-secular context, because he keeps the tension between a secularized world, engagement with the world and the appreciation of religious knowledge. His final perspective on gender and representation might be more advanced than expected. (shrink)

When dealing with Latin sacred inscriptions, the systematic examination of the gifts donated to the superior powers has so far been neglected. This requires, more than ever before, a dialogue between epigraphy and archaeology, which focuses on the materiality of the artefact carrying the script. The article, which results from a lecture given as part of a guest professorship at Paris under the title „Les inscriptions latines sacrées: épigraphie et archéologie en dialogue“, focuses on the vessels donated to higher powers (...) in a religious context. While a total of 400 different vessel names are known from ancient written sources, only 17 of these are also attested in sacred inscriptions. The 40 relevant inscriptions – publicly displayed dedications as well as curse tablets – are analysed with regard to the characterisation of the gifts, the addressees and dedicators. (shrink)

Bei Kant tauchen viele antike Autoren und Theorien auf. In dieser ersten Gesamtbearbeitung zum Thema wird gegen eine langjährige Forschungsmeinung gezeigt, dass nicht so sehr Platon und Aristoteles als vielmehr der hellenistischen Philosophie die entscheidende Rolle für sein Denken zukommt. Anhand der drei Kritiken werden Konstanzen und Umbrüche seines Antikeverständnisses herausgearbeitet und in ihren Konsequenzen für die Kantdeutung beleuchtet.

In this essay I examine the debate between Jürgen Habermas and Charles Taylor on the post-secular state. I argue that, although their views on the relation of religion and politics converge in certain respects, a profound difference remains between their overall approaches. Their disagreement on the epistemic status of religious as opposed to secular moral reasons, and on the role religious arguments can play in the public sphere testify to a deeper schism. Thus what might at first seem like a (...) quarrel about details proves to be a fundamental philosophical divide on the issue of modernity. I conclude that Taylor’s model of post-secularism is more promising as an approach to the challenge posed by growing religious and cultural diversity, for, if understood as a version of “reiterative universalism,” it avoids both moral relativism and Eurocentrism. (shrink)

That the extraordinary narrative experiment known as theSatyriconhas regularly stimulated scholarly investigation into the relationship between status and freedom is not surprising for a work, the longest surviving section of which features an excessive dinner party at the house of alibertus. Much of the discussion has concentrated on the depiction of the dinner's host and his freedmen friends. Following the lead of F. Zeitlin and others in seeing the depiction of a ‘freedmen's milieu’ in theCena, J. Bodel argued in a (...) seminal paper published twenty years ago that theCenaopens a window onto the ‘freedman's mentality’. The last ten years or so have seen a revival of the theme, with much emphasis on the display of an open society in theCena, even a Saturnalian world-view, based on a suspension or reversal of the traditional social hierarchies, all framed by a general air of excessive liberality: whatever satirical lens theSatyricon’s author is seen to have projected onto Trimalchio and his freedmen friends,theyare understood as celebrating ‘freedom's defining difference’. In the light of such a unifying conceptualization of theCena’s motley crew, it is not surprising that scholars have come to understand the libertine assemblage as a reflection of ‘the social class of the “freedmen” in first-centurya.d.Italy’. After all, ‘class’ can be defined as ‘a number of individuals (persons or things) possessing common attributes’, and, with specific regard to human society, as ‘a division of society according to status’. (shrink)

The key weakness of the proposed distinction between rules and similarity is that it effectively converts what was previously seen as a consequence of rule or similarity-based processing, into a definition of rule and similarity themselves – evidence is elevated into a conceptual distinction. This conflicts with fundamental intuitions about processes and erodes the relevance of the debate across cognitive science.

We argue that the notion of distal similarity on which Edelman's reconstruction of the process of perception and the nature of representation rests is ill defined. As a consequence, the mapping between world and description that is supposedly at stake is, in fact, a mapping between two different descriptions or “representations.”.

The debate on the role and identity of Christian social ethics in liberal democracy touches upon the question about the relationship between universality and specificity. Rather than argue for the difference between these approaches, it can be argued that they are to be understood in a differentiated unity with each other. This idea can be substantiated by a figurative appropriation of a Chalcedonian Christology, particularly the communicatio idiomatum . The communicative dimension of this concept has been found to be useful (...) for a reinterpretation of the idea of responsibility. By engaging contemporary positions of communicative ethics, H. Richard Niebuhr's understanding of responsibility as responsiveness, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Christological concept of responsibility in a constructive dialogue with each other, the article has attempted to outline main tenets of a responsive concept of responsibility based on a broadly conceived Chalcedonian Christology. This responsive understanding of responsibility serves as the foundation of a third position beyond the futile antagonism of liberalism and communitarianism. Hereby it maintains the reasonableness of a liberal democratic assertion of a common political discourse, and yet it also contends the necessity of authentic particular worldviews and outlooks. In its argument for such a third-way thinking it hopes to contribute with an understanding where these positions are seen in a constructive relationship – rather than in contrast – with each other. (shrink)

Diese Arbeit ist eine Studie zu einer der ältesten Fragen der Philosophie: der Frage nach der Beziehung, in der unsere Gedanken, unsere Sprache und unsere sinnliche Erfahrung zur Wirklichkeit stehen. In ihrer sowohl historisch als auch systematisch orientierten Studie argumentiert die Autorin für eine realistische Auffassung dieses Verhältnisses. In der Auseinandersetzung mit Positionen von Quine, Strawson oder McDowell wird ein Begriff von Objektivität entwickelt und im Rahmen einer Konzeption sinnlicher Erfahrung ausgewiesen, der auch der skeptischen Herausforderung standhält: In einer detaillierten (...) Analyse der begrifflichen Struktur unseres kognitiven wie perzeptiven Bezugs auf die Außenwelt wird aufgewiesen, dass aus den internen Verknüpfungen erkenntnistheoretischer und ontologischer Aspekte unserer Erfahrung die Notwendigkeit der Existenz- wie auch der Unabhängigkeitsdimension der realistischen These folgt. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Cognitive Linguistics Jahrgang: 26 Heft: 2 Seiten: 211-260.