The axiomatization of probability theory by the national socialistic German mathematician E. Tornier will be embedded between measure theoretic and frequentist approaches to the problem and compared with Tomiers ideological claims. New details of his biography will be given.

Ever since Parmenides, one of philosophy's riddles has been how we are able to direct our thoughts to non-being. Erhard uses the problem of non-existence as the starting point for an analysis of Husserl's phenomenology. He examines Husserl's interpretation of judgments about non-being as judgments made "under assumption" and his analysis of "free fantasy." Erhard thus demonstrates that Husserl is compatible with today's non-relational theories.

Scheibe is one of the most important philosophers of science in Germany. He has written extensively on all the problems that confront the philosophy of physics: rationalism vs. empiricism; reductionism; the foundations of quantum mechanics; space-time, and much more. Since little of his work has been translated into English, he is not yet well known internationally. However, this collection of some 40 of his papers will remedy this unfortunate situation.

Hermann Weyl was one of the early contributors to the mathematics of general relativity. This article argues that in 1929, for the formulation of a general relativistic framework of the Dirac equation, he both abolished and preserved in modified form the conceptual perspective that he had developed earlier in his “analysis of the problem of space.” The ideas of infinitesimal congruence from the early 1920s were aufgehoben in the general relativistic framework for the Dirac equation. He preserved the central idea (...) of gauge as a “purely infinitesimal” aspect of symmetries in a group extension schema. With respect to methodology, however, Weyl gave up his earlier preferences for relatively a-priori arguments and tried to incorporate as much empiricism as he could. This signified a clearly expressed empirical turn for him. Moreover, in this step he emphasized that the mathematical objects used for the representation of matter structures stood at the center of the construction, rather than interaction fields which, in the early 1920s, he had considered as more or less derivable from geometrico-philosophical considerations. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the almost forgotten early dissertation of the phenomenologist Hans Reiner Freiheit, Wollen und Aktivität. Phänomenologische Untersuchungen in Richtung auf das Problem der Willensfreiheit engages with what I call the unity problem of activity. This problem concerns the question whether there is a structure in virtue of which all instances of human activity—and not only “full-blown” intentional actions—can be unified. After a brief systematic elucidation of this problem, which is closely related to the contemporary “problem (...) of action,” I elaborate and critically discuss two relevant threads running through Reiner’s work. The first view concerns the alleged motivational asymmetry between activity and passivity according to which it is essential only for active experiences to be motivated by an underlying passivity. The second view focuses on Reiner’s phenomenology of the will, especially on his notions of “ego-centrality” and “inner will” the latter being introduced in analogy to Brentano’s notion of “inner consciousness.” These two notions are supposed to unify all manifestations of the human will, including “full-blown” intentional actions and non-intentional doings such as laughter. Reiner’s extension of will-based actions to non-intentional activity is one of the most remarkable aspects of his early work. Finally, I show that Reiner ultimately answers the unity problem in the negative because he ends up with the view that besides will-based agency he also acknowledges so-called “motor activity” which is not intrinsically related to the will. I close with a couple of tentative proposals how volitional and motor actions might be unified nonetheless. (shrink)

Dans un discours prononcé à Zurich vers la fin des années 1940, Hermann Weyl a examiné l'épistémologie dialectique de Ferdinand Gonseth et l'a considérée comme trop strictement limitée aux aspects de changement historique. Son expérience de la philosophie diaclectique post-kantienne, en particulier la dérivation du concept de l'espace et de la matière chez Johann Gottlieb Fichte, avait constitué une base dialectique solide pour ses propres études de 1918 en une géométrie purement infinitésimale et la théorie antérieure d'un champ de matière (...) géométriquement unifié (en prolongement du programme Mie-Hilbert). Bien que Weyl se fût alors éloigné des aspects spéculatifs de la philosophie de sa jeunesse et eût montré, en particulier, moins d'enthousiasme qu'auparavant pour Fichte, il nourrissait encore de nombreux doutes sur la base culturelle de la science mathématique moderne et sur son rôle dans la culture matérielle du modernisme de pointe. Pour Weyl, la « réflexion » philosophique était une nécessité culturelle ; il se tourna alors vers lexistentialisme de Karl Jaspers et de Martin Heidegger pour trouver des raisons plus profondes, dans un mouvement comparable à son orientation vers la philosophie de Fichte après la Première Guerre mondiale. Le débat de la fin des années 1940 peut être compris comme une sorte de supplément postérieur à la Seconde Guerre mondiale par rapport à ses commentaires plus connus sur les mathématiques et les sciences naturelles publiés au milieu des années 1920. (shrink)

ERHARD SCHEIBE Kant's Apriorism and Some Modern Positions The terms a priori and its counterpart a posteriori are of medieval origin.1 In the fourteenth ...

Erhard Wiersing ; Literaturverz. S. [1013] - 1071 ; Inhaltsverzeichnis ; Volltext // Exemplar mit der Signatur: München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek -- PVA 2007.1762.

During his whole scientific life Hermann Weyl was fascinated by the interrelation of physical and mathematical theories. From the mid 1920s onward he reflected also on the typical difference between the two epistemic fields and tried to identify it by comparing their respective automorphism structures. In a talk given at the end of the 1940s he gave the most detailed and coherent discussion of his thoughts on this topic. This paper presents his arguments in the talk and puts it in (...) the context of the later development of gauge theories. (shrink)

A successor relation between theories T und T₁ express that T₁, the successor of T, has justifiably superseded T. In physics, for instance, Newton's theory of gravitation has superseded Kepler's laws and, in turn, Einstein's theory has become the successor of Newton's. By now there is no agreement on how a general concept of successor relation would have to be construed. In the present paper attention is drawn to two types of such relations, one deductive the other confirmatory. It seems (...) that what most people are looking for is the deductive type of relation. However, a deductive successor relation has to be justified by showing that if it holds then another, confirmatory relation holds, saying roughly that the actual empirical success of the deducing theory is at least as good as the corresponding success of the deduced theory. Under certain restrictions such a justification is given in the paper. (shrink)

It seems a generally acknowledged view that physics is confined to the investigation of events that can be reproduced. “The natural scientist — says Pauli1 — is concerned with a particular kind of phenomena … he has to confine himself to that which is reproducible… I do not claim that the reproducible by itself is more important than the unique. But I do claim that the unique exceeds the treatment by scientific method. Indeed it is the aim of this method (...) to find and to test natural laws…” Here for Pauli as for everybody else a natural law is a statement expressing a regularity more or less directly related to repeatable events. And one may add that it is not only the possibility of testing that is responsible for our demand of reproducibility. Rather it is the very fact of regularity expressed in it that gives a natural law its dignity and makes it a subject worth studying on its own account. (shrink)

The contribution re-establishes Marcel Mauss's concept of body functional techniques: the social-anthropological basis, the theoretical technical position and the systematic programming of this term. According to Mauss, modern body functional techniques and their media inventions can be interpreted in different ways: as strategies for the reduction of the body and as a project of a reciprocal, psychosomatic, ritualistic and medial intensification.

Building on Uriah Kriegel's recent work on the varieties of consciousness, I consider the question of how many irreducible and fundamental kinds of consciousness there are. This is the project of a fundamental classification of consciousness (C-taxonomy), which will be approached with reference to two figures from the (early) phenomenological tradition, i.e., Franz Brentano and Alexander Pfänder. Both philosophers advocate tripartite taxonomies, thereby opposing the still widely held view that only algedonic and sensory phenomenology exist. After explaining the project of (...) C-taxonomy, I discuss Brentano's and Pfänder's trialisms. My main aim is to show that Pfänder's view, according to which consciousness is exhausted by “object-consciousness”, feeling, and striving, when supplemented by Husserlian ideas, is to be preferred to Brentano's classification, according to which the basic mental kinds are mere presentations, judgments, and “phenomena of love and hate”. I criticize Brentano's separation of doxastically neutral presentations from “positing” judgments, as well as his unification of feelings, emotions, desires, strivings, decisions, and volitions into one basic class. Finally, I reflect on the deeper reasons for Brentano's and Pfänder's divergent taxonomies, which are rooted in their different views of the “mark of the mental” and their different approaches to the active/passive distinction within the mental realm. (shrink)

Inwiefern ist Metaphysik heutzutage noch relevant? Gibt es einen Sinn, in dem Metaphysik fur die Philosophie unverzichtbar ist? Was ist gute Metaphysik, und worin unterscheidet sie sich von schlechter Metaphysik? Was sind Chancen und Probleme genuin metaphysischen Denkens? Die Beitrage des Sammelbandes widmen sich diesen Fragen aus historischer und systematischer Perspektive.

We study a Weyl geometric scalar tensor theory of gravity with scalar field \ and scale invariant “aquadratic” kinematical Lagrange density. The Weylian scale connection in Einstein gauge induces an additional acceleration. In the weak field, static, low velocity limit it acquires the deep MOND form of Milgrom/Bekenstein’s gravity. The energy momentum of \ leads to another add on to Newton acceleration. Both additional accelerations together imply a MOND-ian phenomenology of the model. It has unusual transition functions \, \nu _w\). (...) They imply higher phantom energy density than in the case of the more common MOND models with transition functions \, \, \mu _2\). A considerable part of it is due to the scalar field’s energy density which, in our model, gives a scale and generally covariant expression for the self-energy of the gravitational field. (shrink)

Bd. 1. Darstellung.-- Bd. 2. Kataloge und Anmerkungen.

In this paper I offer a reconstruction of one of Husserl’s various anti-materialist arguments. Husserl hints at this argument in Ideas II & III where he exposes essential differences between mental and material reality (Realität). At its core, Husserl claims that mental entities by their very essence can never be in the same qualitative condition at different times. By sharp contrast, for purely material or physical entities such a cyclical development is not essentially excluded. Accordingly, I will speak of Husserl’s (...) argument from irreversibility. I argue that this argument is modal in nature, and that it can be used to make a case against materialism based on the necessary supervenience of the mental on the physical. My primary goal is to elucidate this argument, and to offer a logical reconstruction using basic modal logic and contemporary notions of supervenience. I conclude that Husserl’s argument is formally valid, and that it can even held to be sound, although the premise regarding the necessary irreversibility of the mental requires further clarification. (shrink)

T. 1. Philosophie und Einzelwissenschaften.--T. 2. Kritik der bürgerlichen Philosophie und Soziologie der Gegenwart.