Gregor Paul, Philosoph an der Universität Karlsruhe, will zeigen, “dass ein Krieg gegen den Terrorismus unmöglich wäre, wenn man gültiger Argumentation folgte”. Die Frage ist, ob es einen „gerechten Krieg“ überhaupt gibt – eine alte Frage, auf die nicht nur in der abendländischen Philosophie unterschiedliche Antworten gegeben worden sind. Paul lässt hier die alte chinesische Philosophie zu Wort kommen. An den Beispielen der Kriege in Afghanistan und Irak wie dem sogenannten Krieg gegen den Terrorismus zeigt Paul, wie für deren (...) “Gerechtigkeit” nicht nur nicht offen argumentiert, sondern eine notwendige allseitige Diskussion verhindert wurde. Erst eine solche offene Diskussion würde das Gewicht der Argumente zeigen und Paul ist überzeugt, dass die Argumente für Kriege jeglicher Art vor dem Forum der Vernunft als zu leicht befunden würden. (shrink)

Alfred Schütz' hat einen Kriterienkatalog zur Charakterisierung unterschiedlicher Erkenntnisstile entwickelt, in dem die Auszeichnung der Lebenswelt nur an wenigen, leicht korrigierbaren Stellen Eingang findet. (1. Abschnitt). Um ihn auf die Lebenswelt anzuwenden, rekurriere ich auf Husserls Bestimmung der Lebenswelt als Wahrnehmungswelt und auf das von Schütz und Thomas Luckmann entwickelte Schichtenmodell der Lebenswelt. Die Lebenswelt erscheint in der Konsequenz als sozial eingrenzbarer Kontext, der von anderen, geltungstheoretisch gleichrangigen Erfahrungen abgehoben ist. Sie bezeichnet keine kultur- oder naturumfassende Kategorie, sondern referiert (...) auf einen beschränkten Handlungsraum (2. Abschnitt). Abschließend ziehe ich Schütz' Kriterienkatalog zur Kennzeichnung zweier nichtlebensweltlicher Erfahrungsbereiche heran, die für den modernen Ausdifferenzierungsprozeß der Erfahrung und für die phänomenologische Analyse von Erfahrungstypen eine herausragende Rolle spielen: Die experimentelle Naturwissenschaft und die Subjektivität (3. Abschnitt). (shrink)

Organizations increasingly rely on algorithm-based HR decision-making to monitor their employees. This trend is reinforced by the technology industry claiming that its decision-making tools are efficient and objective, downplaying their potential biases. In our manuscript, we identify an important challenge arising from the efficiency-driven logic of algorithm-based HR decision-making, namely that it may shift the delicate balance between employees’ personal integrity and compliance more in the direction of compliance. We suggest that critical data literacy, ethical awareness, the use of participatory (...) design methods, and private regulatory regimes within civil society can help overcome these challenges. Our paper contributes to literature on workplace monitoring, critical data studies, personal integrity, and literature at the intersection between HR management and corporate responsibility. (shrink)

Its author was a Carthusian monk. Offered here is a translation, with annotation and an important introduction, of the four books on natural philosophy, the predecessor of modern science.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, best known for his involvement in the anti-Nazi resistance, was one of the 20th century's most important theologians. His ethics have been a source of guidance and inspiration for men and women in the face of evil. Today, Bonhoeffer's theology is being read by Continental thinkers who value his contributions to the recent "religious turn" in philosophy. In this volume, an international group of scholars present Bonhoeffer's thought as a model of Christian thinking that can help shape a (...) distinctly religious philosophy. They examine the philosophical influences on Bonhoeffer and explore the new perspectives his work brings to the perennial challenges of faith and reason, philosophy and theology, and the problem of evil. These essays add Bonhoeffer's voice to important contemporary debates in the philosophy of religion. (shrink)

When does a human being begin to exist? Barry Smith and Berit Brogaard have argued that it is possible, through a combination of biological fact and philosophical analysis, to provide a definitive answer to this question. In their view, a human individual begins to exist at gastrulation, i. e. at about sixteen days after fertilization. In this paper we argue that even granting Smith and Brogaard's ontological commitments and biological assumptions, the existence of a human being can be shown to (...) begin much earlier, viz., with fertilization. Their interpretative claim that a zygote divides immediately into two substances and therefore ceases to exist is highly implausible by their own standards, and their factual claim that there is no communication between the blastomeres has to be abandoned in light of recent embryological research. (shrink)

Gregor Betz explores the following questions: Where are the limits of economics, in particular the limits of economic foreknowledge? Are macroeconomic forecasts credible predictions or mere prophecies and what would this imply for the way economic policy decisions are taken? Is rational economic decision making possible without forecasting at all?

By means of multi-agent simulations, it investigates the truth and consensus-conduciveness of controversial debates. The book brings together research in formal epistemology and argumentation theory.

Although the idiom “genesis and structure” is usually associated with the rise of structuralism in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the two notions are arguably among the most persistent methods in the history of modern philosophy. This article outlines the emergence of “genetic epistemology” in the seventeenth century, when the seemingly antithetical character of the conceptual pair was reworked into a productive epistemological theory, especially in Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, who increasingly used diachronic (genetic) narratives to explain the (...) synchronic (structural) features in their theories. Against Cassirer, I argue that it was Descartes rather than Hobbes who first presented structural issues genetically. In Descartes’ natural philosophy, his frequent claims that showing how a thing is produced reveals its true nature foreshadow precisely what Hobbes and Isaac Barrow later describe as causal definitions of geometric figures, in which the process of ideal generation by motion is what constitutes the very essence of a figure. I link this method to the historicizing discourse on origins in the Enlightenment and conclude by suggesting that there is a trace of Platonic idealism in genetic epistemology. (shrink)

Wie ist es philosophisch zu erklären, dass Menschen frei und selbstbestimmt Entscheidungen treffen, die durch das klassische Begründungsmuster der Eigennützlichkeit und Selbsterhaltung unverständlich bleiben? Der Autor rekonstruiert und erweitert mit seiner neuartigen Konzeption - der autoeidetischen Struktur - Möglichkeitsbedingungen der praktischen Vernunft. Im Mittelpunkt steht dabei die eigene Existenz. Das Streben nach Selbsttreue bedingt das Wollen des Gesollten. Urteil und Praxis werden hierdurch nachvollziehbar zu Bedingungen gelingenden Lebens."--Publisher's website.

Physicalism is a metaphysical thesis easily presented in slogan form – there is nothing over and above the physical – but notoriously difficult to formulate precisely. "Understanding physicalism" combines insights from contemporary philosophy of mind and metaphysics to present a new account of physical properties and metaphysical dependence and, on this foundation, develop a more rigorous and illuminating formulation of the thesis of physicalism.

This collection of essays by Gregor Sebba (1905-1985) reflects the curiosity and insight of his mind. The range of topics is wide, including philosophy and the history of ideas, literature and art; yet there is a single underlying theme - human creativity and the search for truth - pursued along paths as diverse as Greek tragedy, Eric Voegelin's concept of order in history, and the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke and T.S.Eliot.

Brian Gregor draws together a hermeneutics of the self—through Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Taylor—and a theology of the cross—through Luther, Kierkegaard, Bonhoeffer, and Jüngel.

Neural language models (NLMs) are susceptible to producing inconsistent output. This paper proposes a new diagnosis as well as a novel remedy for NLMs' incoherence. We train NLMs on synthetic text corpora that are created by simulating text production in a society. For diagnostic purposes, we explicitly model the individual belief systems of artificial agents (authors) who produce corpus texts. NLMs, trained on those texts, can be shown to aggregate the judgments of individual authors during pre-training according to sentence-wise vote (...) ratios (roughly, reporting frequencies), which inevitably leads to so-called discursive dilemmas: aggregate judgments are inconsistent even though all individual belief states are consistent. As a remedy for such inconsistencies, we develop a self-training procedure—inspired by the concept of reflective equilibrium—that effectively reduces the extent of logical incoherence in a model's belief system, corrects global mis-confidence, and eventually allows the model to settle on a new, epistemically superior belief state. Thus, social choice theory helps to understand why NLMs are prone to produce inconsistencies; epistemology suggests how to get rid of them. (shrink)

The article deals with a seldom exposed but ubiquitous method in the 18th century philosophy, named conjectural history by Dugald Stewart. Its characteristic feature is a peculiar combination of historically verified facts and speculations, which in some authors are even openly fictitious. The hypotheses about prehistory (always set forth in the form of temporal historical narrative) are meant to aid a certain classic philosophical topos of the 18th century: the quest for origins. The article first surveys and compares common points (...) as well as peculiarities of various “treatises on the origins” in the Scottish and French Enlightenment. In the second half it focuses on an implicit but clearly identifiable conjectural history in Diderot's Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville, and on the application of conjectural history in the domain of the intellect and knowledge in the Encylopédie. It seems that the genealogy of knowledge in d'Alembert's Preliminary Discourse most manifestly confirms the initial designation of conjectural history: that it is in fact another name for philosophy. If this holds true, than it might prove useful to search for its first seeds in Descartes’ Discourse on method, a work which places itself on the cross-section of history and fable. (shrink)

An e-mail interview made by Francisco Guzmán. April 2010.

Wo Meinungen aufeinanderprallen, um Verständnis geworben und Überzeugungsarbeit geleistet wird, sind Begründungen nicht weit. Für jede Überzeugung gibt es immer ein, zwei Gründe, die mit Gegengründen konfrontiert und, im Gegenzug, mit weiteren Überlegungen verteidigt werden usw. usf. Schnell sind wir verwirrt und drohen, ohne uns der "Grammatikregeln" vernünftigen Argumentierens zu besinnen, nicht mehr durchzublicken. Die Theorie dialektischer Strukturen leistet einen Beitrag zur Grammatik vernünftigen Argumentierens. Sie stellt Begriffe und Verfahren bereit, um Fragen, die sich angesichts einer komplexen Argumentation stellen können, (...) zu beantworten: Wie beziehen sich die einzelnen Argumente der Debatte aufeinander? Welche Positionen vertreten die verschiedenen Proponenten, und wie lassen sich diese bewerten? Wie gut ist die zentrale These der Kontroverse alles in allem begründet? Ist die und die Argumentationshandlung angesichts des Debattenstandes tatsächlich zweckmäßig und rational? Liegt hier eine zirkuläre - und damit fehlerhafte - Argumentation vor? Die klassische Logik, die sogenannte informal logic und argumentationstheoretische Ansätze der Künstlichen Intelligenz bilden Anknüpfungspunkte der Theorie dialektischer Strukturen. Exemplarisch werden die entwickelten argumentationstheoretischen Methoden zur Analyse umfangreicher philosophischer Kontroversen eingesetzt. (shrink)

The dynamics of neural populations capture the laws of the mindThis paper focuses on the level of neural networks. Examining the case of recurrent neural networks, the paper argues that the dynamics of neural populations form a privileged level of explanation in cognitive science. According to Schöner, this level is privileged, because it enables cognitive scientists to discover the laws governing organisms’ cognition and behaviour.

Climate models don’t give us probabilistic forecasts. To interpret their results, alternatively, as serious possibilities seems problematic inasmuch as climate models rely on contrary-to-fact assumptions: why should we consider their implications as possible if their assumptions are known to be false? The paper explores a way to address this possibilistic challenge. It introduces the concepts of a perfect and of an imperfect credible world, and discusses whether climate models can be interpreted as imperfect credible worlds. That would allow one to (...) use models for possibilistic prediction and salvage widespread scientific practice. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung Fußballfans bilden eine eigene Subkultur, die sich selbst noch einmal im Fußballstadion von den anderen Zuschauern als soziale Gruppierung unterscheidet. Ausgehend von Schütz’s Lebensweltbegriff wird die Fankultur als ein geschlossenes Sinngebiet mit einem eigenen Realitätsakzent sowie einem besonderen Erkenntnis- und Erlebnisstil aufgefasst. Der vorliegende Beitrag analysiert die konstitutiven Elemente dieser fanspezifischen Lebenswelt am Beispiel der Fangemeinschaft des FC Energie Cottbus. Die dort beobachteten Rituale, symbolischen Darstellungsmittel, Selbstinszenierungen und Kollektivausdrücke stellen die Konstitutionsbedingungen für einen gemeinsamen Wirklichkeitsentwurf dar. Es wird gezeigt, (...) dass es der Fankultur, trotz der ständigen Spielerwechsel und fortschreitenden Ökonomisierung im Fußball, keineswegs an Vielfalt und identitätsstiftenden Orientierungen fehlt. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 9, September 2022.

Se postula que ciencia y tecnología tienen consecuencias positivas y negativas para la humanidad, cargadas de intención y propósito, y reflejo de las visiones, intenciones, prejuicios y objetivos particulares de cada sociedad. Desde este marco, el trabajo se centra en el campo de la bio/gene/nanomedicina, que busca reparar supuestas discapacidades, incapacidades, enfermedades y defectos, pero instala el dilema ético de quién decide lo que es discapacidad, enfermedad, incapacidad o “defecto”. Propone el autor un camino desde la Declaración sobre la Ciencia (...) de la Conferencia Mundial sobre la Ciencia de la Unesco de 1999. (shrink)

Gregor Moder’s Hegel and Spinoza: Substance and Negativity is a lively entry into current debates concerning Hegel, Spinoza, and their relation. Hegel and Spinoza are two of the most influential philosophers of the modern era, and the traditions of thought they inaugurated have been in continuous dialogue and conflict ever since Hegel first criticized Spinoza. Notably, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German Idealists aimed to overcome the determinism of Spinoza’s system by securing a place for the freedom of the subject within (...) it, and twentieth-century French materialists such as Althusser and Deleuze rallied behind Spinoza as the ultimate champion of anti-Hegelian materialism. This conflict, or mutual rejection, lives on today in recent discussions about materialism. Contemporary thinkers either make a Hegelian case for the productiveness of concepts of the negative, nothingness, and death, or in a way that is inspired by Spinoza they abolish the concepts of the subject and negation and argue for pure affirmation and the vitalistic production of differences. Hegel and Spinoza traces the historical roots of these alternatives and shows how contemporary discussions between Heideggerians and Althusserians, Lacanians and Deleuzians are a variation of the disagreement between Hegel and Spinoza. Throughout, Moder persuasively demonstrates that the best way to read Hegel and Spinoza is not in opposition or contrast but together: as Hegel and Spinoza. (shrink)