This paper argues that the notion of a single object or 'being one' does not require worldly or perceived conditions of integrity and even less so concept-relative atomicity. It generally is based on conditions of integrity of some sort, but not strictly so. It rather is imposed by the use of count categories in natural language and thus makes a case for linguistic idealism.

It is a standard assumption in contemporary metaphysics that concrete objects come with a location in space and time. This applies not only to material objects and events, but also modes (such as the roundness of the apple, the softness of the pillow, Socrates' wisdom) and entities that have been called 'disturbances' (e.g. holes, folds, faults, and scratches). Taking the approach of descriptive metaphysics, I will show that modes and disturbances fail to have a bearer-independent spatial location. This allows for (...) a metaphysical explanation of the Chomskyan contrast between 'There is a fly believed to be in the bottle' and the unacceptable 'There is a flaw believed to be in the argument'. A subsidiary point this paper makes is that in their lack of a direct spatial location, modes need to be sharply distinguished from tropes as a category of foundationalist metaphysics that has been at the center of a pursuit of a one-category ontology since Williams (1953). (shrink)

This work employs Husserl's concept of responsibility as a guiding clue for the clarification of the self-understanding of phenomenology as a `rigorous science'. Originally an appeal for radical accountability and ultimate foundation in the field of philosophical theory, Husserl's concept of responsibility culminated finally in a philosophy of human self-renewal. This philosophical telos of ultimate self-responsibility, which was also fuelled by a striving towards cultural reform, was realised for Husserl in a transcendental field of transparent self-evidence, linguistic univocity and transhistorical (...) ideality. With reference to J. Derrida's reading of Husserl, the author shows, that the elements singled out as those for which phenomenology cannot assume responsibility - exteriority, passivity and contingency - are not only delivered over to the interminable process of being worked upon, but remain rather constitutive for the endeavour of phenomenologising itself. This becomes manifest in the inevitable linguisticality of phenomenology, its `secondary enworlding', as it is conceived in E. Fink's project of the VIth Cartesian Meditation. In the context of this linguisticality it is the explosive power of the metaphor, which vouches for the openness, that fulfils the mission of phenomenology to carry in its innermost nature responsibility for a space of transgression. (shrink)

The notions of part and whole play an important role for ontology and in many areas of the semantics of natural language. Both in philosophy and linguistic semantics, usually a particular notion of part structure is used, that of extensional mereology. This paper argues that such a notion is insufficient for ontology and, especially, for the semantic analysis of the relevant constructions of natural language. What is needed for the notion of part structure, in addition to an ordering among parts, (...) is the notion of integrated whole. In the context of semantics, the notion of an integrated whole needs to be relativized to a situation, or so it is argued. (shrink)

I call 'empathetic attitude reports' attitude reports such as 'I believe you that you will come back' and 'I understand you that you are not in the mood'. I will argue that such attitude reports cannot be analysed in terms of two-place attitudinal relations but involve an essential interpersonal relation of trust or understanding.

Negative compatibility effects in the masked-prime paradigm are usually obtained when primes are masked effectively. With ineffective masks—and primes above the perceptual threshold—positive compatibility effects occur. We investigated whether this pattern reflects a causal relationship between conscious awareness and low-level motor control, or whether it reflects the fact that both are affected in the same way by changes in physical stimulus attributes. In a 5-session perceptual learning task, participants learned to consciously identify masked primes. However, they showed unaltered NCEs that (...) were not different from those produced by participants in a control group without equivalent perceptual learning. A control experiment demonstrated that no NCEs occur when prime identification is made possible by ineffective masking. The results suggest that perceptual awareness and low-level motor control are affected by the same factors, but are fundamentally independent of each other. (shrink)

Philosophers frequently draw on natural language to motivate properties, numbers, and propositions as objects, and it is generally taken for granted that abstract objects of this sort are well-reflected in natural language and in fact that reference to them in natural language is pervasive In this paper, I will review and modify in a certain way the view I had advanced in Abstract Objects and the Semantics of Natural Language (Moltmann 2013a). This is the view that natural language permits reference (...) to abstract objects only in its periphery, not in its core. Even though reference to abstract objects of the sort of properties, propositions, and numbers is available only in the periphery of language, natural language permits reference to other sorts of abstract objects in its core, in particular abstract artifacts of various sorts. (shrink)

Existence as reflected in natural language is not a univocal notion, but divides into different modes of being, such as existence (as, roughly, endurance) and occurrence. One aim of the paper is to distinguish sharply between abstract artifacts and non-existent objects (e.g., plans vs. planned events that fail to occur); another is to argue for validity as a mode of being distinct from existence, as well as for corresponding distinctions among non-being.

The ethical behavior prevalent in an organization often determines business success or failure. Much research in the business context has scrutinized ethical behavior, but there are still few insights into its roots; this study furthers this line of inquiry. In line with identity work theory, we examine how employees’ identification with a family business shapes internal ethical decision-making processes. Because it is individuals who engage in decision-making—be it ethical or not—our research perspective centers on the individual level. We followed an (...) inductive, qualitative approach and conducted interviews with 19 employees in seven family businesses. We found that individuals engage in identity work when they identify as individual family firm employees and when they identify with the perceived characteristics of the family firm. These processes of identification, in turn, influence how employees cope with ethical situations. Our findings contribute to ethics and family business research, as well as to identity theory. (shrink)

Throughout history, philosophers have drawn on language to clarify or uncover philosophically relevant intuitions, making a tacit distinction between core and periphery of language. This paper argues that such intuitions have the same status as linguistic intuitions, neither of which has the status of belief or even acceptance. This leads to the view that linguistically reflected philosophically relevant intuitions are part of the knowledge of grammar in an extended sense.

Special quantifiers are quantifiers like 'something', 'everything', and 'several things'. They are special both semantically and syntactically and play quite an important role in philosophy, in discussions of ontological commitment to abstract objects, of higher-order metaphysics, and of the apparent need for propositions. This paper will review and discuss in detail the syntactic and semantic peculiarities of special quantifiers and show that they are incompatible with substitutional and higher-order analyses that have recently been proposed. It instead defends and develops in (...) formal detail a semantic analysis of special quantifiers as nominalizing quantifiers. On this analysis, special quantifiers involve both singular objectual quantification and implicit on non-singular (higher-order, plural, or mass) quantification. The analysis rests on a range of recent insights and proposals in generative syntactic theory, in particular the recognition of '–thing' as a light noun and a potential classifier as well as recent views of the decomposition of attitudinal and locutionary verbs in syntax. (shrink)

The concept of self-generated action is controversial, despite extensive study of its neural basis. Why is this concept so troublesome? We analyse the concept of self-generated action as employed by and. There are two definitions of self-generated action; as operant action and as underdetermined action. The latter draws on subjective experience. Experiments on action awareness suggest that experience may not be a good guide for defining self-generated action. Nevertheless, we agree with Passingham and colleagues that self-generated actions exist distinct from (...) operant actions. But defining ‘self-generated’ by the degree of involvement of an endogenous process risks regress. We sketch an alternative account of self-generated action that tries to avoid these problems to make self-generated actions accessible to experimental science. (shrink)

This paper argues for a distinction between fictional characters, as parts of intentionally created abstract artifacts, and intentional objects, as nonexistent objects generated by referential acts that fail to refer. It argues that intentional objects as the nonexistent objects of imagination and other objectual attitudes are well-reflected in natural language, though in a highly restricted way, reflecting their ontological dependence on referential acts. The paper elaborates how that ontological dependence can be understood.

This paper gives a perspectival overview of the semantics of potential property-referring terms and presents new and surprising generalizations about explicit property-referring terms like 'the property of being wise', which raise fundamental issues regarding ontology and learnability and a core-periphery distinction in natural language ontology.

Es geht nicht darum, die Religion wieder auferstehen zu lassen [...]. Sondern es geht darum, die blosse Vernunft auf die Unbegrenztheit hin zu offnen, die ihre Wahrheit ausmacht. Im vielbehaupteten Trend einer Ruckkehr zur Religion erweist sich Jean-Luc Nancys Philosophie als widerstandig: Einerseits steht die Frage nach der Bedeutung von Religion und insbesondere des Christentums im Mittelpunkt seiner Uberlegungen, andererseits stellt er sich nicht in die Tradition einer neuen (De-)Legitimation von Religion. In Auseinandersetzung mit Jean-Luc Nancy, insbesondere mit seinem Projekt (...) einer Dekonstruktion des Christentums, widmen sich die Beitrage dieses Bandes der allgemeinen Verortung des Phanomens der Religion in pluralistischen Gemeinschaften aus theologischer und philosophischer Sicht. (shrink)

Reflecting upon a recently published collection of essays dealing with the study of philosophy and theology at the religious study-houses (studia) and at the papal and royal court in the 13th and 14th century, the review-article presents an overview of the various approaches to researching the relevance of the institutional context for understanding the forms and doctrinal contents of the period’s intellectual production. On the basis of the volume under discussion, five basic approaches are identified and discussed: first, a focus (...) on the institutional framework of education at the religious orders’ studia; second, a (re)reading of important works in the context of the studia’s teaching practices; third, the regional particularity of certain study-houses; fourth, the formative role of individual personalities for the order’s intellectual profile; and fifth, the papal and fifth, the papal and royal court as specific setting of some influential philosophical and theological debates. (shrink)

In managing the Covid-16 pandemic, policy makers took actions which require the cooperation of individual citizens to succeed while the actions partially come at remarkable costs for individuals. The brief paper employs a thought experiment to identify factors which affect individuals’ propensity to cooperate in the public goods game. These factors reasonably comprise, for example, risk perception and attitude towards risk, embeddedness in a social network or the desire for social approval and may differ remarkably among the individuals of a (...) collective. The paper adopts a management control perspective which appears to be particularly helpful to identify how to implement policy makers’ actions with respect to the diverse individuals in a collective. In order to predict the overall outcome of “unpleasant” actions, an approach is required which allows to capture the heterogeneity of individuals within a collective which makes agent-based modelling a promising candidate. (shrink)

Prior’s problem consists in the impossibility of replacing clausal complements of most attitude verbs by ‘ordinary’ NPs; only ‘special quantifiers’ that is, quantifiers like 'something' permit a replacement, preserving grammaticality or the same reading of the verb: (1) a. John claims that he won. b. ??? John claims a proposition / some thing. c. John claims something. In my 2013 book Abstract Objects and the Semantics of Natural Language, I have shown how this generalizes to nonreferential complements of various other (...) intensional predicates and argued for a Nominalization Theory of special quantifiers. In this paper, I will review and extend the range of linguistic generalizations that motivate the Nominalization Theory and show that they pose serious problems for higher-order and substitutional analyses of special quantifiers. (shrink)

Many urgent problems that societies currently face—from climate change to a global pandemic—require citizens to engage with scientific information as members of democratic societies as well as to solve problems in their personal lives. Most often, to solve their epistemic aims (aims directed at achieving knowledge and understanding) regarding such socio-scientific issues, individuals search for information online, where there exists a multitude of possibly relevant and highly interconnected sources of different perspectives, sometimes providing conflicting information. The paper provides a review (...) of the literature aimed at identifying (a) constraints and affordances that scientific knowledge and the online information environment entail and (b) individuals' cognitive and motivational processes that have been found to hinder, or conversely, support practices of engagement (such as critical information evaluation or two-sided dialogue). Doing this, a conceptual framework for understanding and fostering what we callonline engagement with scientific informationis introduced, which is conceived as consisting of individual engagement (engaging on one's own in the search, selection, evaluation, and integration of information) and dialogic engagement (engaging in discourse with others to interpret, articulate and critically examine scientific information). In turn, this paper identifies individual and contextual conditions for individuals' goal-directed and effortful online engagement with scientific information. (shrink)

This paper gives a perspectival overview of the semantics of potential property-referring terms and presents new and surprising generalizations about explicit property-referring terms like 'the property of being wise', which raise fundamental issues regarding ontology and learnability and a core-periphery distinction in natural language ontology.

Besonderes Augenmerk richtet Friederike Barth dabei auf den philosophischen Hintergrund dieses Werks, da die in derEthikentworfene ethische Theologie Bonhoeffers auf einem zumeist unausgewiesenen, differenzierten Rezeptions- und ...

Introduction -- Historical background : schools and politics -- Major representatives : Daoists of the Liang and Tang -- The sources : commentaries and scriptures -- Key concepts : mystery, Dao, and the greater cosmos -- Salvation : Dao-nature and the sage -- The teaching : mysticism, cultivation, and integration -- Changes in the Pantheon : Laozi and the heavenly deities -- The body of the sage : the three-in-one and the three- -- Fold body of the Buddha.

We prove a theorem about models with indiscernibles that are cofinal in a given linear order. We apply this theorem to obtain new independence results for Quine's set theory New Foundations, thus solving two open problems in this field.

In diesem Band sind die nachgelassenen Schriften Moritz Schlicks zur Ethik gesammelt, ediert und kommentiert. Die Beschäftigung mit ethischen Fragen war für Schlick während seines gesamten Lebens von hoher Relevanz, daher sind in diesem Band Schriften aus vier Jahrzehnten versammelt, die die Entwicklung seines ethischen Denkens veranschaulichen. Sie beginnen mit Vorarbeiten zu der „Lebensweisheit“, einem seiner ethischen Hauptwerke, welches bereits in MSGA I/3 erschienen ist. Im Laufe seiner akademischen Laufbahn in Rostock, Kiel und Wien hielt Schlick immer wieder Vorlesungen und (...) Vorträge zu ethischen Themen. Herausstechend sind hier sicherlich „Über Ästhetik und Ethik“, eine von sehr wenigen Schriften Schlicks zur Ästhetik, weiterhin die Dokumente zur Vorlesung „Ethik und Kulturphilosophie“ vom Wintersemester 1935/6 in Wien. Letztere legen nahe, dass Schlick eine Reihe von Publikationen plante, in denen er eine systematische Darstellung seiner Philosophie entwickeln wollte. In dieser sind Ethik und Kulturphilosophie Teile eines zusammenhängenden Ganzen, neben der Geschichte der Philosophie, Logik, Naturphilosophie und Erkenntnistheorie. (shrink)

Ziel der Arbeit ist zu zeigen, dass sich in der theoretischen Philosophie David Humes Ansätze zu einer therapeutischen Methode finden, wie sie von Ludwig Wittgenstein angewandt und beschrieben wurde. Im ersten Teil wird Wittgensteins Konzeption der Philosophie und ihre Anwendung anhand einer genauen Textexegese dargestellt. Der zweite Teil untersucht primär die Humeschen Überlegungen zu Kausalität und Induktion, seine methodologischen Aussagen sowie seine Perzeptionstheorie und argumentiert für die These, dass Hume ebenfalls, wenn auch mit Einschränkungen, Elemente einer therapeutischen Methode und eine (...) entsprechende Konzeption der Philosophie zugeschrieben werden können. (shrink)

This my 3am interview with Richard Marshall about my work and its inspirations. It focuses on my research on parst and wholes, tropes, and abstract objects.

Among the extensive literature on the first Critique, very few commentators offer a thorough analysis of Kant's conception of inner sense. This is quite surprising since the notion is central to Kant's theoretical philosophy, and it is very difficult to provide a consistent interpretation of this notion. In this paper, I first summarize Kant's claims about inner sense in the Transcendental Aesthetic and show why existing interpretations have been unable to dissolve the tensions arising from the conjunction of these claims. (...) Secondly, I present my own reconstruction of Kant's model of inner sense, relying essentially on Kantian considerations found in the B-version of the Transcendental Deduction. My main idea is that inner sense, for Kant, is a passive faculty that gets affected by the understanding performing its figurative synthesis on material given in outer sense. In the remainder of the paper, I highlight a few consequences of my interpretation and outline ways to deal with some objections. (shrink)

Perceptions of criminality and remorse are critical for legal decision-making. While faces perceived as criminal are more likely to be selected in police lineups and to receive guilty verdicts, faces perceived as remorseful are more likely to receive less severe punishment recommendations. To identify the information that makes a face appear criminal and/or remorseful, we successfully used two different data-driven computational approaches that led to convergent findings: one relying on the use of computer-generated faces, and the other on photographs of (...) people. In addition to visualising and validating the perceived looks of criminality and remorse, we report correlations with earlier face models of dominance, threat, trustworthiness, masculinity/femininity, and sadness. The new face models of criminal and remorseful appearance contribute to our understanding of perceived criminality and remorse. They can be used to study the effects of perceived criminality and remorse on decision-making; research that can ultimately inform legal policies. (shrink)

The quest for the one "Truth" in a pluralist society seems to have become as redundant as it is problematic - in much the same way that the idea of one "God" being the all-determining reality has. Yet we have not given up searching and the word "God" still continues to polarize, whether in society, theology or philosophy. In view of this seeming paradox, Friederike D. Rass seeks an alternative route that goes off the beaten track and beyond the (...) temptation to resignedly retreat to relativist or fundamentalist positions. She argues that it is precisely the supposedly futile quest for a single "Truth" as well as the continuous questioning of the meaning of the word "God" that provide an essential guide to responsible action today. (shrink)

During the 1990s, the Berlin women’s prison was reformed to do justice to female inmates. This redesigning of space and programs was intended to meet women-specific conditions and needs. The present paper engages with this prison reform as transformation in the name of gender justice. Based on interviews with prison reformers, criminologists, and policymakers, as well as on the analysis of historical documents, we illuminate how a specific figure of the “criminalized woman” helps to translate the abstract notion of social (...) justice into situated practice. From the 1970s onward, a new knowledge of women’s crime would emerge: it constituted female offenders as victims of patriarchal oppression and victimization, allowing the prison system to be criticized as androcentric and discriminatory against women. We argue that subsequent reform pursued gender justice in the form of difference-based, gender-responsive programs and spaces targeting individual inmates’ character and mindset. Thereby, the reformers’ initial critique of social justice would be unintentionally depoliticized and so gender, economic, and political inequalities remained unaddressed. Our purpose is hence twofold: first, to review the recent history of women’s incarceration in Germany, and second, to add a social justice focus to the international criminological debate on gender, prison, and reform. (shrink)

Given the rise of populist parties in Germany and the charge that multiculturalism is dead, the present research examines how everyday Germans formulate an account of cultural diversity and multiculturalism. We employ a critical discursive psychological analysis and focus particularly on the arguments used to criticize cultural diversity and multiculturalism. Asynchronous online interviews were conducted with eighteen native-born German citizens. The data analysis shows that participants criticized cultural diversity and multiculturalism by deploying ‘Leitkultur-style’ nationalistic discourses and normalizing the hierarchical relations (...) between immigrants and Germans. Participants also questioned multiculturalism as an ideology and everyday practice and moved back and forth between diverging accounts. These discourses reinforce dominant ideologies that place immigrants’ responsibility to assimilate and adopt German cultural norms and values. Our findings suggest that there are critical, flexible, and contradictory social markers of multiculturalism that have significant ramifications for policy and to everyday people who face the real task of living with cultural diversity. (shrink)

Within The Doctrine of Right in The Metaphysics of Morals Kant deals with the social institution of household, the Domestic Society, next to Property Right and Contract Right as part of the Private Right. The juridical problem to solve is the question to what extent human beings can be entitled to dispose persons as a “belonging” at all. This problem of Reification insistently arises with regard to the relation of partners in a marriage: According to Kant, Sexuality as a consumption (...) by which human beings make use of themselves as of things is reconcilable with the dignity of humanity only under the condition of marriage. By marrying, persons acquire one another reciprocally, so that they aren't in an external relation to one another any more. However, in contrast to this strict juridical reciprocity of the sexes in a marriage there is no corresponding equality concerning the regime of the household. Hence, with his anthropology of the sexes Kant unintentionally implements teleological patterns of argumentation into the Right of pure practical reason. (shrink)