Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the „Evangelist of Racism“, had a major influence on German Emperor Wilhelm II, especially in forming his nationalistic and anti-Semitic views. The monarch and the author developed a mutual understanding and appreciation that lasted over 25 years. This article illuminates the circumstances of their initial acquaintance through the edition and analysis of two documents which were two hitherto unpublished documents: Chamberlain's diary for the dates 28.–31. 10. 1901 and a letter to his aunt Anne Guthrie of 11. (...) 11. 1901. Both documents are compared to other known reports of this meeting. Chamberlain accepted Wilhelm's invitation to Germany where they met in Liebenberg in 1901 in a circle of select members of the German aristocracy. Their first contact is reconstructed here showing the extent to which Wilhelm's thoughts coincided with those of Chamberlain. The author concludes that the meeting with Chamberlain in 1901 was most decisive in the development of Wilhelm's own thinking and had serious consequences for the later course of historical events. In addition, this first meeting is particularly interesting because of the participation of Adolf Harnack who was at that time very close to the Emperor and also corresponded with Chamberlain. The differences in character and views between Chamberlain, Wilhelm and Harnack also surfaced during this memorable meeting. (shrink)

Books 6–10 of Cyril of Alexandria’s monumental work of refutation “Against Julian” are being published for the first time in a modern critical edition with an extensive apparatus of sources and parallel texts. In addition, the volume includes all known Greek and Syriac fragments from the lost volumesas well asan extensive introductionto the transmission of the fragments.

This book introduces generative grammar as an area of study and asks what it tells us about the human mind. Wolfram Hinzen lays the foundation for the unification of modern generative linguistics with the philosophies of mind and language. He introduces Chomsky's program of a 'minimalist' syntax as a novel explanatory vision of the human mind. He explains how the Minimalist Program originated in work in cognitive science, biology, linguistics, and philosophy, and examines its implications for work in these (...) fields. He considers the way the human mind is designed when seen as an arrangement of structural patterns in nature, and argues that its design is the product not so much of adaptive evolutionary history as of principles and processes that are ahistorical and internalist in character. Linguistic meaning, he suggests, arises in the mind as a consequence of structures emerging on formal rather than functional grounds. From this he substantiates an unexpected and deeply unfashionable notion of human nature. Clearly written in nontechnical language and assuming a limited knowledge of the fields it examines and links, Minimal Mind Design will appeal to a wide range of scholars in linguistics, philosophy, and cognitive science. It also provides an exceptionally clear insight into the nature and aims of Chomsky's Minimalist Program. (shrink)

Life's Solution builds a persuasive case for the predictability of evolutionary outcomes. The case rests on a remarkable compilation of examples of convergent evolution, in which two or more lineages have independently evolved similar structures and functions. The examples range from the aerodynamics of hovering moths and hummingbirds to the use of silk by spiders and some insects to capture prey. Going against the grain of Darwinian orthodoxy, this book is a must read for anyone grappling with the meaning of (...) evolution and our place in the Universe. Simon Conway Morris is the Ad Hominen Professor in the Earth Science Department at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St. John's College and the Royal Society. His research focuses on the study of constraints on evolution, and the historical processes that lead to the emergence of complexity, especially with respect to the construction of the major animal body parts in the Cambrian explosion. Previous books include The Crucible of Creation (Getty Center for Education in the Arts, 1999) and co-author of Solnhofen (Cambridge, 1990). Hb ISBN (2003) 0-521-82704-3. (shrink)

This interdisciplinary book considers the relationship between language and thought from a philosophical perspective, drawing both on the philosophical study of language and the purely formal study of grammar, and arguing that the two should align. The claim is that grammar provides homo sapiens with the ability to think in certain grammatical ways and that this in turn explains the vast cognitive powers of human beings. Evidence is considered from biology, the evolution of language, language disorders, and linguistic phenomena.

Philosophie ist wissentlicher Einhegungsversuch des Nichtwissens. Wo immer sie daher die Bedeutung und Wirksamkeit des Nichtwissens nicht präsent hält, verfehlt sie ihre Mitte. Das hat sich seit der Antike bis heute nicht geändert. Allerdings blieb es den Interessen der Zeiten und Denker vorbehalten, die Mischformen von Wissen und Nichtwissen in ihrer Eigenart mehr oder weniger eingehend zu analysieren. Selbst wenn die sokratische Formel vom Wissen des Nichtwissens durchgängig gerne zitiert wurde: Wie die Formen des Wissens in ihren schwachen, aber unentbehrlichen (...) Variationen näherhin zu charakterisieren sind, hat über die Zeiten die Philosophen eher selten interessiert. Aber diese schwachen Formen des Wissens wie Ahnung, Mutmaßung und das Gefühl als Grundlage von Situationseinschätzungen sind für unseren Alltag von erheblicher Bedeutung. Wolfram Hogrebe diskutiert in seinem Buch Formen des Wissens in ihrer szenischen Relevanz, ja das Szenische als Wissensform selbst. Ein von der Philosophie bislang völlig ignoriertes Thema. Aber die Philosophie kann gar nicht ignorieren, ohne dennoch auch in ihrem Absehen noch etwas Mitgesehenes hervortreten zu lassen. (shrink)

This pioneering book lays new foundations for the study of reference and truth.

The view that proper names are uniformly predicates has recently gained prominence. I review linguistic evidence against it. Overall, the linguistic evidence suggests that proper names function as predicates when they appear in a grammatically predicative position and as referential expressions when they are grammatically in a referential position. Conceptual grounds on which the predicativist view might nonetheless be upheld include ‘uniformity’, i.e., that a single semantic value be lexically specified for names in all of their occurrences irrespective of differences (...) in their grammar. However, ‘being a predicate’ or ‘being referential’ are not lexical properties of words but indications for how these grammatically function on an occasion of their use. Moreover, the intuitively referential and intuitively predicative uses of proper names precisely covary with grammatical differences. A proper name is therefore a predicate when it is predicatively used, not when its grammar and meaning are different. Given this grammar-meaning alignment there is no motivation to posit a novel ‘covert syntax’ for names in their referential uses, which breaks this alignment. Cross-linguistic evidence from languages such as Catalan, which features overt determiners in referential uses of proper names, moreover turns out to strongly support the view that the grammar of human language is systematically sensitive to differences in the referential and predicative uses of names. (shrink)

This chapter explores some fundamental consequences of the correspondence between physical process and computations. Most physical questions may be answerable only through irreducible amounts of computation. Those that concern idealized limits of infinite time, volume, or numerical precision can require arbitrarily long computations, and so be considered formally undecidable. The behavior of a physical system may always be calculated by simulating explicitly each step in its evolution. Much of theoretical physics has, however, been concerned with devising shorter methods of calculation (...) that reproduce the outcome without tracing each step. Computational irreducibility is common among the systems investigated in mathematics and computation theory, but it may well be the exception rather than the rule, since most physical questions may be answerable only through irreducible amounts of computation. (shrink)

Wolfram Hogrebe beschäftigt sich in diesem Buch mit dem sogenannten Zwischenreich - einem alten philosophischen Gedanken, wonach das Philosophieren es mit einer Art von Zwischenraum zu tun hat, der die Ordnungen der Begriffe und der Vorstellungen in eine bemerkenswerte Schwebe bringt. Das Zwischen ist da gleichsam ein Medium, das die Gedanken und Sprachen trägt und so in zuweilen unbekannte Gebiete führt, in denen sich das Denken verändert. Hogrebe zeigt, wie sehr dieses Zwischen, das sich auch in Naturerfahrungen aufzuschliessen vermag, (...) Thema bei so unterschiedlichen Philosophen und Dichtern wie Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Martin Heidegger, Henry David Thoreau und Peter Handke ist. (shrink)

We argue that the commonly accepted existence of grammatical concepts such as Person (in the grammatical sense) or Tense poses an unrecognized challenge to the idea that human thought is independent of language. The argument is that such concepts identify aspects of linguistic expressions that also systematically define the contents and identity of the thoughts expressed in language. Since grammatical concepts are not known to have non-grammatical analogues, the thoughts in question do not appear to be non-linguistic in nature. We (...) conclude that language is unlikely to be merely a medium in which independently constituted thoughts are expressed. (shrink)

A traditional view maintains that thought, while expressed in language, is non-linguistic in nature and occurs in non-linguistic beings as well. I assess this view against current theories of the evolutionary design of human grammar. I argue that even if some forms of human thought are shared with non-human animals, a residue remains that characterizes a unique way in which human thought is organized as a system. I explore the hypothesis that the cause of this difference is a grammatical way (...) of structuring semantic information, and I present evidence that the organization of grammar precisely reflects the organization of a specific mode of thought apparently distinctive of humans. Since there appears to be no known non-grammatical structuring principle for the relevant mode of thought, I suggest that grammar is that principle, with no independent ?Language of Thought? needed. (shrink)

Properly understood, Kant’s moral philosophy is incompatible with constitutivism. According to the constitutivist, being subject to the moral law cannot be a matter of free choice, and failure to c...

Much philosophical attention has been devoted to the truth predicates of natural language and their logic. However, lexical truth predicates are neither necessary nor sufficient for a truth-attribution to occur, which warrants closer attention to the grammar of truth attribution. A unified analysis of five constructions is offered here, in two of which the lexical truth predicate occurs (It's true that John left and That John left is true), while in the three remaining, it does not (John left; It seems (...) that John left; and It's that John left). This analysis is philosophically significant for four reasons. First, it explains why speakers of natural language find standard instances of Tarski-inspired equivalences (e.g. That John left is true iff John left) intuitively compelling. Second, it derives the widespread ‘deflationist’ intuition that truth has no substantive content. Third, insofar as the deflationist sees insights on truth as flowing from understanding our practice of truth attribution, it furthers the deflationist agenda through a new analysis of such attributions. Finally, it advances the philosophical project of the ‘naturalization’ of truth by reducing our understanding of truth to our competence in the grammar of truth, as an aspect of our biological endowment. (shrink)

Wolfram Hogrebe examines the anthropological relevance of logomantic [divinational] precursors of philosophy and poetry along with the idea of the implicit citizen and the nature of implicit musical structures.".

A defining assumption in the debate on contextual influences on truth-conditional content is that such content is often incompletely determined by what is specified in linguistic form. The debate then turns on whether this is evidence for positing a more richly articulated logical form or else a pragmatic process of free enrichment that posits truly unarticulated constituents that are unspecified in linguistic form. Questioning this focus on semantics and pragmatics, this article focuses on the independent grammatical dimensions of the problem. (...) Against the background of a principled account of the different ways in which the lexicon and the grammar, respectively, determine aspects of propositional meaning, and an uncontentious notion of content, nothing turns out to be ‘missing’ in grammatical expressions in order for them to encode complete propositional thoughts. As this predicts, when putatively hidden constituents are made overt or are otherwise added, propositions result that are systematically different from the thoughts originally expressed. Context, while potentially affecting lexically specified aspects of meaning, never affects grammar-determined ones, suggesting a specific role for grammar in the normal cognitive mode. (shrink)

Apologies. The purpose of the following talk is to give an overview of the present state of aims, methods and results in Pure Proof Theory. Shortage of time forces me to concentrate on my very personal views. This entails that I will emphasize the work which I know best, i.e., work that has been done in the triangle Stanford, Munich and Münster. I am of course well aware that there are as important results coming from outside this triangle and I (...) apologize for not displaying these results as well.Moreover the audience should be aware that in some points I have to oversimplify matters. Those who complain about that are invited to consult the original papers.1.1. General. Proof theory startedwithHilbert's Programme which aimed at a finitistic consistency proof for mathematics.By Gödel's Theorems, however, we know that we can neither formalize all mathematics nor even prove the consistency of formalized fragments by finitistic means. Inspite of this fact I want to give some reasons why I consider proof theory in the style of Gentzen's work still as an important and exciting field of Mathematical Logic. I will not go into applications of Gentzen's cut-elimination technique to computer science problems—this may be considered as applied proof theory—but want to concentrate on metamathematical problems and results. In this sense I am talking about Pure Proof Theory.Mathematicians are interested in structures. There is only one way to find the theorems of a structure. Start with an axiom system for the structure and deduce the theorems logically. These axiom systems are the objects of proof-theoretical research. Studying axiom systems there is a series of more or less obvious questions. (shrink)

“Ethical life” is Hegel’s term for the actuality of what Kant calls an “ethical community.” As members of the same ethical community, human beings are related to one another as persons in and only in acting from nothing but respect for the same practical law. Kant and Hegel both take ethical life to be a necessary, nay, the highest, end of pure reason. I argue that this is correct. And I identify the idea of ethical life with the idea of (...) a peculiar form of love. Kant and Hegel disagree—in a curiously reciprocal fashion—about the reach of ethical life and about our capacity to know it to reside within our power: while Kant identifies ethical life with the actuality of the ethical community of all possible human beings, Hegel holds that it is necessarily limited to some particular body politic; and while Hegel thinks that to be a human being is to self-knowingly co-constitute an ethical community, Kant believes that it is to be unable to know oneself to even be apt for this. With Hegel and against Kant, I argue that the only way to have the idea of ethical life is to live it. But with Kant and against a naïve form of Hegelianism, I argue that to be conscious of oneself as a human being, a practically rational animal, is to be conscious of oneself as morally evil, i.e. as actively prone to deeming one’s own particularity the supreme law. I show that this entails Hegelian particularism. And I end by noting that this saddles the Hegelian with the task of demonstrating that ethical particularization belongs to the very idea of pure reason itself, objectively conceived. (shrink)

I argue that the implementation of theDummettian program of an ``anti-realist'' semanticsrequires quite different conceptions of the technicalmeaning-theoretic terms used than those presupposed byDummett. Starting from obvious incoherences in anattempt to conceive truth conditions as assertibilityconditions, I argue that for anti-realist purposesnon-epistemic semantic notions are more usefully kept apart from epistemic ones rather than beingreduced to them. Embedding an anti-realist theory ofmeaning in Martin-Löf's Intuitionistic Type Theory(ITT) takes care, however, of many notorious problemsthat have arisen in trying to specify suitableintuitionistic (...) notions of semantic value,truth-conditions, and validity, taking into accountthe so-called ``defeasibility of evidence'' forassertions in empirical discourses. (shrink)

To understand language, philosophers have related sentences and/or their uses to the concept of truth. I study an aspect of this relation by studying the actual structures that sentences expressing truth judgements have, an issue that I consider empirical. So I propose to switch from studying ‘truth conditions’ for sentences (determined metaphysically, or normatively) to studying the structures of expressions of the form This sentence is true/has (some) truth to it. I argue that the status of the ‘truth predicate’ must (...) be understood in terms of the syntax (in Chomsky's naturalistic sense of syntax) of possessive constructions, rather than in terms of metaphysical, epistemic, or action–theoretic factors. (shrink)

The possibility and extent of thought without language have been subject to much controversy. Insight from non- or minimally verbal humans can inform this debate empirically. Since most such individuals are on the autism spectrum, of which they make up a sizable 25–30%, an important connection between language and autism transpires. Here we propose a model which makes sense of this link and explains why the non-verbal human mind, as present evidence suggests, represents a fundamentally different cognitive phenotype. This model (...) views the relevant part of the autism spectrum as reflecting the breakdown of a cognitive phenotype of which language is an inherent element and which will manifest principled limitations in the latter's absence. (shrink)

Mind–body dualism has rarely been an issue in the generative study of mind; Chomsky himself has long claimed it to be incoherent and unformulable. We first present and defend this negative argument but then suggest that the generative enterprise may license a rather novel and internalist view of the mind and its place in nature, different from all of, (i) the commonly assumed functionalist metaphysics of generative linguistics, (ii) physicalism, and (iii) Chomsky’s negative stance. Our argument departs from the empirical (...) observation that the linguistic mind gives rise to hierarchies of semantic complexity that we argue (only) follow from constraints of an essentially mathematical kind. We assume that the faculty of language tightly correlates with the mathematical capacity both formally and in evolution, the latter plausibly arising as an abstraction from the former, as a kind of specialized output. On this basis, and since the semantic hierarchies in question are mirrored in the syntactic complexity of the expression involved, we posit the existence of a higher-dimensional syntax structured on the model of the hierarchy of numbers, in order to explain the semantic facts in question. If so, syntax does not have a physicalist interpretation any more than the hierarchy of number-theoretic spaces does. (shrink)

A soaring intellectual narrative starring the radical, brilliant, and provocative philosophers Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, and Ayn Rand by the critically acclaimed author of Time of the Magicians, Wolfram Eilenberger The period from 1933 to 1943 was one of the darkest and most chaotic in human history, as the Second World War unfolded with unthinkable cruelty. It was also a crucial decade in the dramatic, intersecting lives of some of history's greatest philosophers. In particular, four women (...) whose parallel ideas would come to dominate the twentieth century-at once in necessary dialogue and striking contrast with one another. Simone de Beauvoir, already in a deep emotional and intellectual partnership with Jean-Paul Sartre, was laying the foundations for nothing less than the future of feminism. Born Alissa Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg before emigrating to the US in 1926, Ayn Rand was honing one of the most politically influential voices of the 20th century. Her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged would reach the hearts and minds millions of Americans in the decades to come, becoming canonical libertarian texts, which continue to echo today among Silicon Valley's tech elite. Hannah Arendt was developing some of today's most important leftwing ideas, culminating with the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism and her arrival as a peerless intellectual celebrity. Perhaps the greatest thinker of all was a classmate of de Beauvoir: Simone Weil, who turned away from fame to devote herself entirely to refugee aid and the resistance movement during the war. Ultimately, in 1943, she would starve to death in England, a martyr and true saint in the eyes of many. Few authors can synthesize gripping storytelling with sophisticated philosophy like Wolfram Eilenberger. The Visionaries tells the story of four singular philosophers-indomitable women who were refugees and resistance fighters-each putting forward a vision of a truly free and open society at a time of authoritarianism and war. (shrink)

Theories of belief and meaning have long occupied philosophers. Typically, there is a correlation between the meaning of a sentence that is uttered and the content of the attitude that the speaker thereby conveys. This is also why a sentence can be used to specify content in an attribution of the attitude to the speaker. From the perspective of a theory of semantic content, there is a level of description where mental states and sentences can be said to share a (...) content or meaning. But there is a contrary view gaining currency, claiming that belief and meaning have to be kept apart conceptually, theoretically, and methodologically. Thus it could be that meaning is an internal or private notion that can be accounted for purely linguistically (or even non-intentionally altogether), while the same may not be true of belief. The volume brings together researchers from various areas in philosophy, psychology, and linguistics to address these questions. The tradition of logical positivism, sometimes thought of as having been a passing phase in twentieth-century philosophy, has as a matter of record remained a vibrant force. But it has shifted from broadside critiques of other systems of thought into a deeper study of how the structure of logic and language impact human behavior and psychological conditioning. Among the contributors to this international symposium are Michael Esfeld, Wolfram Hisses, Max Kolbel, Isaac Levi, Diego Marconi, James McGilvary, Olaf Muller, Paul Peitroski and Norbert Hornstein, Sebastian Rodl, and Alberto Voltolini. (shrink)

In this, his latest book, Wolfram Hogrebe continues to unfold his project of an informal epistemology with an analysis of ties ("ligatures") to be found below the level of theoretically discussed norms, laws, and institutional regulations and nevertheless indispensable for a humane coexistence. Risks associated with such often hidden constellations of knowledge are also discussed. Master thinkers such as Schelling, Hegel, Heidegger, but also more marginal figures such as Felix Hausdorff alias Paul Mongré or artists such as Beuys are (...) discussed. In his inimitable style of concise yet succinct sketches, Hogrebe thus causes thinking to confront the often subtle nuances of being in a state of wonderment"--Publisher's website. (shrink)

The question of 20th century philosophy was: how are we humans situated in our world? In forms of consciousness, as Husserl insistently analyzed, in language games, as Wittgenstein thought, or in a prior understanding of being, as Heidegger recommended? Wolfram Hogrebe summarizes these answers in what he calls scenic existence. This is grounded in certainties in which we experience ourselves sensitively 'tinted'. In this respect, forms of consciousness, language games and understanding of being are only built up from an (...) anonymous sonority. Wolfram Hogrebe has been following these circumstances for several years. In this new book, he delineates the project in historically informed, multi-faceted differentiations, terminating in a plea for a new enlightenment that may be understood as a program for our time. (shrink)

Short description: Wie kann der Boden für eine kulturmenschliche Potenzialentfaltung politisch und gesellschaftlich fruchtbar gemacht werden?; Promotional text: Immanuel Hermann Fichtes ›System der Ethik‹ ist vor dem Hintergrund einer innenpolitischen Erstarrung als Folge der Revolution von 1848 und des in Deutschland sich nahezu gleichzeitig ereignenden wirtschaftlichen ›Take-off‹ des beginnenden Industriezeitalters verfasst. In direktem Bezug auf diese Umbruchssituation bietet Fichtes Konzeption, die Wolfram Schmitz in seiner Studie erstmals umfassend untersucht, Leitlinien für eine weitgreifende Reform von Staat und Gesellschaft.; Biographical note: (...) Dr. Wolfram Schmitz hat Philosophie, Geschichte und Soziologie studiert. (shrink)

"What is mathematics?" is a question that has been debated since antiquity. This book presents a groundbreaking and surprising answer to the question-showing through the concept of the physicalization of metamathematics how both mathematics and physics as experienced by humans can be seen to emerge from the unique underlying computational structure of the recently formulated ruliad. Written with Stephen Wolfram's characteristic expositional flair and richly illustrated with remarkable algorithmic diagrams, the book takes the reader on a unprecedented intellectual journey (...) to the center of some of the deepest questions about mathematics and its nature-and points the way to a new understanding of the foundations and future of mathematics, taking a major step beyond ideas from Plato, Kant, Hilbert, Gödel and others. (shrink)

First published in 1989. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Internalism is an explanatory strategy that makes the internal structure and constitution of the organism a basis for the investigation of its external function and the ways in which it is embedded in an environment. It is opposed to an externalist explanatory strategy, which takes its departure from observations about external function and mind-environment interactions, and infers and rationalizes internal organismic structure from that. This paper addresses the origins of truth, a basic ingredient in the human conceptual scheme. I suggest (...) the necessity of pursuing an internalist line of explanation for it, as adopted in the biolinguistic program and generative grammar at large. According to this view, the concept of truth is a presupposition for the way language is used in relation to the world, rather than a function of that use or a consequence of language-world relations. (shrink)

Recent literature describing the process and pathways of the agrarian transition in Southeast Asia suggests that the rise of agricultural intensification and the growth of commodity markets will lead to the demise of swidden agriculture. This paper offers a longitudinal overview of the conditions that drive the agrarian transition amongst indigenous swidden cultivators and migrant paddy farmers in central Palawan Island, the Philippines. In line with regional agrarian change, we describe how a history of conservation policies has criminalized and pressured (...) swidden farmers to adopt more intensive “modern” agricultural practices. We examine how indigenous swidden cultivators adjust their practice in response to recent changes in policies, security of harvests, and socio-cultural values vis-à-vis intensification. Rather than suggest that this transition will lead to the demise of swidden, results reveal that farmers instead negotiate a shifting ground in which they lean on and value swidden as a means of negotiating agrarian change. (shrink)