In this paper, we trace the conceptual history of the term ?metamathematics? in the nineteenth century. It is well known that Hilbert introduced the term for his proof-theoretic enterprise in about 1922. But he was verifiably inspired by an earlier usage of the phrase in the 1870s. After outlining Hilbert's understanding of the term, we will explore the lines of inducement and elucidate the different meanings of ?metamathematics? in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Finally, we will investigate the (...) earlier occurrences and come to the conclusion that the conceptual prehistory of the Hilbertian notion of metamathematics dates back to 1870, whereas the history of the word starts in 1799 at the latest. What is this: metamathematics? It is something amazing everybody, [?] since it makes the mind dizzy and withdraws thinking its sole fulcrum.1 1 Brunner 1898, p. 832: ?Was ist das: Metamathematik? Es ist etwas, was einen Jeden in das äusserste Staunen versetzt, [?] was das Gehirn schwindlig macht und dem Denken seinen einzigen Stütz- und Angelpunkt zu entziehen droht? (shrink)

This paper argues that Derrida’s aporetic conclusions regarding moral and political concepts, from hospitality to democracy, can only be understood and accepted if the notion of différance and similar infrastructures are taken into account. This is because it is the infrastructures that expose and commit moral and political practices to a double and conflictual (thus aporetic) future: the conditional future that projects horizonal limits and conditions upon the relation to others, and the unconditional future without horizons of anticipation. The argument (...) thus turns against two kinds of interpretation: The first accepts normative unconditionality in ethics but misses its support by the infrastructures. The second rejects unconditionality as a normative commitment precisely because the infrastructural support for unconditionality seems to rule out that it is normatively required. In conclusion, the article thus reconsiders the relation between a quasi-transcendental argument and its normative implications, suggesting that Derrida avoids the naturalistic fallacy. (shrink)

In the face of the ever-growing effect the actions of the present may have upon future people, most conspicuously around climate change, democracy has been accused, with good justification, of a presentist bias: of systemically favouring the presently living. By contrast, this paper will argue that the intimate relation, both quasi-ontological and normative, that Derrida's work establishes between temporality and justice insists upon another, more future-regarding aspect of democracy. We can get at this aspect by arguing for two consequences of (...) the deconstructive affirmation of sur-vivre, of the alterity of death in life. Firstly, justice is not first of all justice for the living, but intergenerational from the start. This is so because no generation coincides with itself; rather, it dies and is reborn at every moment, and so – and this is the second consequence – consists in taking turns. Affirming life as living-on means affirming that it involves exchanging life's stations, as the young become the old, and the unborn become the dead. In this sense, the justice of living-on, I will argue, shares an essential feature with democracy, whose principle of exchanging the rulers with the ruled led Derrida to characterize it in terms of the wheel. Democracy consists in the principled assent to power changing hands, a switchover life demands of every generation at every turn. This assent further requires an acceptance of the gift of inheritance without which no life can survive. But as the gift can also never be fully acknowledged or appropriated, it must be passed on to the indefinite, unknown future, in a turning that is the time of life. (shrink)

This book endeavors to fill the conceptual gap in theorizing about embodied cognition. The theories of mind and cognition which one could generally call "situated" or "embodied cognition" have gained much attention in the recent decades. However, it has been mostly phenomenology, which has served as a philosophical background for their research program. The main goal of this book is to bring the philosophy of classical American pragmatism firmly into play. Although pragmatism has been arguably the first intellectual current which (...) systematically built its theories of knowledge, mind and valuation upon the model of a bodily interaction between an organism and its environment, as the editors and authors argue, it has not been given sufficient attention in the debate and, consequently, its conceptual resources for enriching the embodied mind project are far from being exhausted. In this book, the authors propose concrete subject-areas in which the philosophy of pragmatism can be of help when dealing with particular problems the philosophy of the embodied mind nowadays faces - a prominent example being the inevitable tension between bodily situatedness and the potential universality of symbolic meaning. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 7, Page 1014-1034, September 2022. The plural, impure or discordant nature of time has become an important theme in recent critical social and political theory. Against Althusser’s dismissal of Sartre’s presumedly Hegelian understanding of time and history, this article establishes Jean-Paul Sartre as a key figure in this debate on the plurality of temporalities. Especially in the Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre understands history and the social in terms of a multiplicity of uneven (...) and non-synchronous temporalisations, rejecting an notion of time as a universal container within which events take place. The originality of Sartre’s approach is that it establishes a link between the notion of the plurality of temporalities and the problem of freedom and domination. His mature social and political theory allows us to understand temporalisation as a strategy for domination, and objective social temporality as key to a form of anonymous or structural domination. A reconstruction of this highly complex and sophisticated approach to thinking domination through time can also shed an original light on the temporal dimension of democracy and totalitarianism. (shrink)

This paper defends the normativity of meaning thesis by clearing up a misunderstanding about what the thesis amounts to. The misunderstanding is that according to it, failing to use an expression in accordance with the norms which constitute its meaning amounts to changing the expression’s meaning. If this was what the thesis claimed, then it would indeed be easy to show that meaning norms do not yield prescriptions and cannot be followed. However, there is another reading: what is constitutive of (...) meaning is not the norm’s being followed, but the norm’s being applicable. On this reading, some standard arguments against the thesis lose their force. After discussing the alternative reading and its consequences, the paper goes on to sketch a model of how norms of meaning become applicable in the first place. This model supports the view that talk of meaning has its pragmatic home in contexts of linguistic calibration. (shrink)

A uniform construction for sequent calculi for finite-valued first-order logics with distribution quantifiers is exhibited. Completeness, cut-elimination and midsequent theorems are established. As an application, an analog of Herbrand’s theorem for the four-valued knowledge-representation logic of Belnap and Ginsberg is presented. It is indicated how this theorem can be used for reasoning about knowledge bases with incomplete and inconsistent information.

Adam Smith’s is often falsely portrayed as having argued that radical selfishness is a force for the good and that this “invisible hand’ is his market mechanism. This paper argues that Smith’s real market mechanism, the sympathy manoeuvre, is a viable alternative to Schumpeterian and mainstream models of innovation in economics and also could help build a firmer theoretical basis for other approaches such as Responsible Innovation. To Smith all human activity was social and must be understood and explained in (...) terms of the sentiments involved. Discovery, for instance, is driven by three sentiments (wonder, surprise, admiration), economic activities by sympathetic imagination, the need for exchange, the need to better one’s position in life, and the need for gratitude. Through sympathetic imagination, his famous model of the impartial spectator, Smith elegantly connects the individual and society. Smith’s innovation process is thus an exercise in social construction and not a destructive process based on radical selfishness. The paper argues that this social innovation process is a viable alternative to the extant approaches that are essentially asocial and amoral (economism) or ideologically normative (Responsible Innovation). (shrink)

This paper argues that ceteris paribus (cp) laws exist based on a Lewisian best system analysis of lawhood (BSA). Furthermore, it shows that a BSA faces a second trivialization problem besides the one identified by Lewis. The first point concerns an argument against cp laws by Earman and Roberts. The second point aims to help making some assumptions of the BSA explicit. To address the second trivialization problem, a restriction in terms of natural logical constants is proposed that allows one (...) to describe regularities, as specified by basic generics (e.g. ‘birds can fly’) and universals (e.g. ‘all birds can fly’). It is argued that cp laws rather than strict laws might be a part of the the best system of such a regularity-based BSA, since sets of cp laws can be both (a) simpler and (b) stronger when reconstructed as generic non-material conditionals. Yet, if sets of cp laws might be a part of the best system of a BSA and thus qualify as proper laws of nature, it seems reasonable to conclude that at least some cp laws qualify as proper laws of nature. (shrink)

This paper critically assesses the proposal that scientific realists do not need to search for a solution of the measurement problem in quantum mechanics, but should instead dismiss the problem as ill-posed. James Ladyman and Don Ross have sought to support this proposal with arguments drawn from their naturalized metaphysics and from a Bohr-inspired approach to quantum mechanics. I show that the first class of arguments is unsuccessful, because formulating the measurement problem does not depend on the metaphysical commitments which (...) are undermined by ontic structural realism, rainforest realism, or naturalism in general. The second class of arguments is problematic due to its refusal to provide an analysis of the term "measurement". It turns out that the proposed dissolution of the measurement problem is in conflict not only with traditional forms of scientific realism but even with the rather minimal realism that Ladyman and Ross themselves defend. (shrink)

In response to the claim that democracies are inherently short-termist, this article argues for a new way to understand them as being committed to future generations. If taking turns among rulers and ruled is a normative idea inherent to the concept of democracy, then such turn-taking commits democrats to a fair turn with future generations.

One of the most common arguments in favour of the state's authority is that without the coordinating hand of political institutions, we could not achieve important moral benefits. I argue that if we understand authority correctly, then coordination cannot even in principle establish that coordinators have political authority.

(2013). Critical notice of Aaron James, Fairness in Practice: A Social Contract for a Global Economy. Canadian Journal of Philosophy: Vol. 43, No. 3, pp. 382-401.

Freges Kontextprinzip "Nur im Zusammenhange eines Satzes bedeuten die Wörter etwas" hat auch nach der von ihm vollzogenen Angleichung von Behauptungssätzen an Eigennamen Gültigkeit für die formale Sprache der "Grundgesetze". Der Bedeutungsvollständigkcitsbeweis, den er für sein Logiksystem anstrebt, schließt eine unmittelbare Anwendung dieses Prinzips nicht nur auf die unvollständigen Funktionsausdrücke, sondern auch auf die leerstellenfreien Wertverlaufsnamen ein. Wahrheitsnamen (Sätze) zeichnen sich vor anderen symbolsprachlichen Eigennamen in mehrfacher Hinsicht, insbesondere durch ihre semantische Selbständigkeit aus. Wertverlaufsnamen haben nur im Zusammenhang eines Wahrheitswertnamens (...) eine Bedeutung. Ihre Bedeutung besteht in ihrem Beitrag zur Bestimmung der Bedeutung von Wahrheitswertnamen, in denen sie vorkommen. (shrink)

The article considers the relationships among three arguments that purport to establish the intrinsically contradictory or paradoxical nature of the modern project aiming at the equal consideration of all. The claim that the inevitable historical insertion of universal-egalitarian norms leads to always particular and untransparent interpretations of grammatically universal norms may be combined with the claim that the logic of determination of political communities tends to generate exclusions. The combination of these two claims lends specific force to the third argument (...) according to which equal consideration perpetually requires the non-egalitarian project of understanding individuals on their own terms. Hence, taking off from a recent debate between Christoph Menke and Jürgen Habermas, I argue that the former is right to diagnose an aporetic self-reflection in egalitarian universalism, while agreeing with the latter about the indispensability of deliberative democratic frameworks for the defence of both egalitarian and non-egalitarian norms. Key Words: Theodor Adorno • deliberative democracy • Jacques Derrida • egalitarianism • equality • Jürgen Habermas • Christoph Menke • singularity • universalism. (shrink)

Expert athletes are determined to make faster and better decisions, as revealed in several simple heuristic studies using verbal reports or micro-movement responses. However, heuristic decision-making experiments that require motor responses, also being considered as the embodied-choice experiments, are still underrepresented. Furthermore, it is less understood how decision time and confidence depend on the type of embodied choices players make. To scrutinize the decision-making processes, this study investigated the embodied choices of male athletes with different expertise in a close-to-real-life environment; (...) 22 elite, and 22 amateur team handball players performed a sport-specific embodied-choice test. Attack sequences were shown to the players, who had to choose between four provided options by giving a respective sport-specific motor response. We analyzed the frequencies of specific choices and the best choice, as well as the respective decision time and decision confidence. Elite and amateur players differed in the frequencies of specific choices, and elite players made the best choice more often. Slower decision times of elite players were revealed in specific choices and in best choices, the confidence of decisions was rated equally high by both player groups. Indications are provided that elite players make better choices rather slower, instead of faster. We suppose this is due to specific sensorimotor interactions and speed-accuracy-tradeoffs in favor of accuracy in elite players. Our findings extend expert decision-making research by using an embodied-choice paradigm, highlighting considerations of decision time and confidence in future experiments. (shrink)

Influencing students’ educational achievements first requires understanding the underlying processes that lead to variation in students’ performance. Researchers are therefore increasingly interested in analyzing the differences in behavior displayed in educational assessments rather than merely assessing their outcomes. Such analyses provide valuable information on the differences between successful and unsuccessful students and help to design appropriate interventions. Complex problem solving (CPS) tasks have proven to provide particularly rich process data as they allow for a multitude of behaviors several of which (...) can lead to a successful performance. So far, this data has often been analyzed on a rather aggregated level looking at an average number of actions or predefined strategies. with only a few articles investigating the specific actions performed. In this paper, we illustrate and discuss a more detailed report the results of an exploratory analysis of CPS process data based on the specific actions performed.log-files that is aimed at distinguishing between students that applied the correct strategy to a problem but failed to solve it and those applying the strategy successfully. In that, the sequence of behavior displayed is reduced to interpretable parts (n-grams) that allow searching for meaningful differences between the two groups of students. This level of analysis allows finding previously undefined or unknown patterns within the data and increases our understanding of the processes underlying successful problem -solving behavior even further. (shrink)

Takeuti and Titani have introduced and investigated a logic they called intuitionistic fuzzy logic. This logic is characterized as the first-order Gödel logic based on the truth value set [0,1]. The logic is known to be axiomatizable, but no deduction system amenable to proof-theoretic, and hence, computational treatment, has been known. Such a system is presented here, based on previous work on hypersequent calculi for propositional Gödel logics by Avron. It is shown that the system is sound and complete, and (...) allows cut-elimination. A question by Takano regarding the eliminability of the Takeuti-Titani density rule is answered affirmatively. (shrink)

Was verbindet Hammer, Pinsel und Geige? Werkzeuge und Instrumente vermitteln zwischen menschlichem Körper und Materie. So genießen diese Objekte eine genuine Gemeinsamkeit, und doch gründet gerade in der Differenz beider Begriffe die abendländische Unterscheidung zwischen handwerklichen und künstlerischen bzw. musikalischen oder wissenschaftlichen Tätigkeiten. Die Beiträge des achten Bandes der Hamburger Forschungen zur Kunstgeschichte nehmen Werkzeuge und Instrumente aus einer kunsthistorischen Perspektive und im interdisziplinären Dialog in den Blick. Das Augenmerk liegt gleichermaßen auf den Techniken ihrer Handhabung, ihrer Diskursivierung in Kritik (...) und Theorie sowie ihrer Darstellung im Bild. Mit Beiträgen von: Gotlind Birkle, Martine Clouzot, Philippe Cordez, Gottfried Korff, Matthias Krüger, François Lamy, Katja Müller-Helle, Ulrich Pfisterer, Albrecht Pohlmann, François Poplin, Julia Ann Saviello, Monika Wagner. (shrink)

Pierre Duhem gilt ais einer der wichtigsten Reprüsentanten der franzosischen Wissenschaftsphilosophie um 1900. Seine Konzeption physikalischer Theorien wird üblicherweise ais moderne Umsetzung des antiken – proto-positivistischen – Programms der „Rettung der Phänomene‟ angesehen. Diese Sicht ist richtig, bedarf aber der Ergänzung, indem der diskursive Kontext der Duhemschen Position berücksichtigt wird. Im vorliegenden Beitrag wird dargelegt, dass Duhems philosophischer Zeitgenosse Abel Rey eine zentrale Rolle in diesem Zusammenhang spielte.

It is commonly held that the ascription of truth to a sentence is intersubstitutable with that very sentence. However, the simplest subclassical logics available to proponents of this view, namely K3 and LP, are hopelessly weak for many purposes. In this article, I argue that this is much more of a problem for proponents of LP than for proponents of K3. The strategies for recapturing classicality offered by proponents of LP are far less promising than those available to proponents of (...) K3. This undermines the ability of proponents LP to engage in public reasoning in classical domains. (shrink)

El artículo estudia ciertos aspectos de la noción agustiniana de belleza. Se limita al estudio del nombre latino pulchritudo y sus derivados, dejando de lado otros términos como speciosus, formosus o decorus.

It is widely accepted that Bentham was influenced by the thought of Helvétius. But the fact that Bentham copied some elements from Helvétius leads to the question of how he changed the Helvétian ideas, and in what respects he aspired to go further than Helvétius. Taking as a starting point Bentham's claim that Helvétius was the Bacon of moral science, whereas he himself was to be the Newton, I argue for the following. First, Bentham's theory can be understood as an (...) attempt to work out in detail the theoretical programme that Helvétius outlined in order to reform moral philosophy. Second, in contrast to Helvétius, Bentham's theory is guided by considerations of feasibility, and this leads to claims that are more moderate than Helvétius's claims. Third, whereas Helvétius did not indicate how utilitarian principles should enter political decisions, in Bentham's approach the citizens, and especially philosophers, are considered active political agents. (shrink)