European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

Author Max Black argues that language should conform to the discovered regularities of experience it is radically mistaken to assume that the conception of language is a mirror of reality.

This reply to five continuing commentaries on my 1991 target article on “Is human information processing conscious” focuses on six related issues: 1) whether focal attentive processing replaces consciousness as a causal agent in third-person viewable human information processing, 2)whether consciousness can be dissociated from human information processing, 3) continuing disputes about definitions of "consciousness" and about what constitutes a “conscious process” , 4) how observer-relativity in psychology relates (and does not relate) to relativity in physics, 5) whether the first-person (...) viewable causal efficacy of consciousness counts as ‘real’ causal efficacy and 6) a clarification of the sense in which first- and third-person causal accounts of mental processing are complementary and mutually irreducible. (shrink)

Max Weber: Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus Edition Holzinger. Taschenbuch Berliner Ausgabe, 2016, 4. Auflage Vollständiger, durchgesehener Neusatz bearbeitet und eingerichtet von Michael Holzinger In: Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 20. Bd., Heft 1, S. 1-54, 1904; 21. Bd., Heft 1, S. 1-110, 1905. Erstdruck der vorliegenden, umgearbeiteten Fassung in: Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, Bd. I, Tübingen (Mohr Siebeck) 1920, S. 17-206. Textgrundlage ist die Ausgabe: Max Weber: Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie. 8., photomechanisch gedruckte Auflage; Band 1, (...) Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1986 (1. Auflage 1920) Herausgeber der Reihe: Michael Holzinger Reihengestaltung: Viktor Harvion Gesetzt aus der Minion Pro, 11 pt. (shrink)

This article examines the first-century c.e.Laus Pisonis, an anonymous panegyric for a certain Piso that lays particular emphasis on his skill at lyre-playing, ball games and the board game, the ludus latrunculorum. Whereas this focus has often been a cause of consternation among critics, this article argues that play is a crucial element of the poem's poetic and political operations. The first section shows that the poem employs images of poetic maturity and of temporality in order to justify a light (...) or ludic topic for an allegedly young poet. The second section identifies a hitherto unobserved telestich in the passage describing the ludus latrunculorum and argues that this letter game defines a positive period of play within the poem. The third section further demonstrates that this letter game is aimed specifically at the patron Piso as he is represented within the poem. That is, the poet parallels Piso's potential to uncover the telestich in the text and his ability to uncover the poet's hidden talent. The concluding fourth section explores the wider impact of this reinterpretation of the Laus Pisonis for the literary history of the Early Principate. It proposes that the poem's playfulness should not be seen as reflecting the progressive disempowerment of the political elite. Rather, the poem is an early case of Roman political discourse encroaching on the value of the trivial and the boundaries of otium. The Laus Pisonis makes play political. (shrink)

Neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalism claims ethical goodness is a kind of human natural goodness, where natural goodness is a function of human nature. Call this the core thesis. The normativity objection claims the core thesis fails because ethical goodness is normative and natural goodness is not. In this study I aim to cast new light on this objection and propose a new strategy of response. My argument divides into two main moves. In the first, I side with critics in arguing that (...) Aristotelian naturalism has a serious problem that concerns the normativity of human nature, although standard formulations of the normativity objection do not quite capture it. The problem is that there is an explanatory gap in Aristotelian naturalism’s account of ethical goodness. I argue that although facts about human nature and natural goodness are irreducibly normative in the evaluative sense, they are not necessarily normative in the practical sense. Hence, Aristotelians need to explain what makes such facts practically normative. They have not successfully done this. This explanatory gap threatens the viability of Aristotelian naturalism, for it leaves a central feature of ethical experience—viz. the practical normativity of ethical facts—unexplained. I call this the normativity problem. In the second main move of my argument I propose a two-part solution to the normativity problem. The first part consists in a new metanormative account of the source of normativity I call Aristotelian constructivism. It yields an objectivist, species-relative and naturalistic account of practical normativity. The second part of the solution is an account of practical reason that connects human final ends with human nature. Aristotelian constructivism explains the practical normativity of those final ends, and thus of facts about human nature, without reference to the evaluative status of those facts. Aristotelian constructivism thereby enables Aristotelian naturalists to retain their core thesis. (shrink)

This essay situates the protest actions of the German environmentalist group Die letzte Generation (LG) within an environmental critique of digital capitalism. It specifically examines the temporality of LG’s activism at the intersection of the affective ecology of digital capital and certain aspects of an apocalyptic imagination. I propose a Spinozist approach to the media environment in which LG operates that may open a path toward an immanent critique of LG’s publicity-oriented practices.

The commentary is presented in three sections. Section 1 presents a brief summary of the main theses in Cummins' paper. In section 2, I argue that this analysis is not peculiar to cognition, and that in fact, a similar, more general analysis has been given [3] in fundamental areas of inquiry, hitherto independent of cognitive science. Finally, in section 3, it is argued that, if this general form of Cummins' analysis is correct, it calls for a profound re‐evaluation of our (...) conception of science. (shrink)

The emerging epistemic community of ecosemioticians and the multidisciplinary field of inquiry known as ecosemiotics offer a radical and relevant approach to so-called global environmental crisis. There are no environmental fixes within the dominant code, since that code overdetermines the future, thereby perpetuating ecologically untenable cultural forms. The possibility of a sustainability transition (the attempt to overcome destitution and avoid ecocatastrophe) becomes real when mediated by and through ecosemiotics. In short, reflexive awareness of humankind's linguisticality is a necessary condition for (...) transforming ecologically maladaptive cultural forms. As a multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary research program integrating the human and natural sciences, ecosemiotic inquiry closes the gap between biophysical ecology and human ecology. A provisional outline of a pragmatic theory of ecoserniotics attempts to describe the processes by which adaptive cultural changes might be facilitated and points toward substantive content areas that constitute sites for further research. Ecosemiotic inquiry frames cultural codes as these shape and reproduce the ongoing stream of individual and societal choices that shape distinctively human existence in a larger context of biophysical realities that drive natural selection. However, while ecosemiotics is a necessary condition for the sustainability transition, it is not a sufficient condition. (shrink)

As evidence that cultural group selection has occurred, Richerson et al. simply retrodict that humans use language, punish each other, and have religion. This is a meager empirical haul after 30 years. This contrasts sharply with the adaptationist approach to human behavior – evolutionary psychology – which has produced scores of novel, specific, and empirically confirmed predictions.

Reproduktion auf Grundlage der Ausgabe: Verlag von Friedrich Cohen; Bonn 1929. - Die hier gesammelten Aufsätze aus der letzten Schaffensperiode Max Schelers sind zwar unabhängig voneinander entstanden und veröffentlicht worden - Näheres sagen die Anmerkungen am Schluß des Bandes -, aber sie schließen sich doch zur Einheit zusammen durch die metaphysische Haltung, die der kurze, an die Spitze gestellte und für den Gesamttitel maßgebende Aufsatz mit großer Deutlichkeit offenbart. Er ist auch die letzte von Max Scheler selbst abgeschlossene Schrift. Die (...) wenigen an dem Text der Erstveröffentlichungen vorgenommenen inhaltlichen Änderungen gehen auf eigenhändige Notizen des Verfassers zurück. (shrink)

A growing number of philosophers are defending what can be understood as Right Reason Accounts of the norm of assertion. According to these accounts, an agent’s asserting that _p_ is epistemically permissible only if that agent asserts that _p_ for a right (normative) reason, i.e., a reason that at least contributes to making it epistemically permissible to assert that _p_. In this paper, I argue that Right Reason Accounts do not allow for the possibility of asserting epistemically permissibly only for (...) the wrong reason(s). However, it is a commonplace in all normative domains (e.g., morality, prudence, and aesthetics) that an agent can—at least sometimes—φ rightly (or permissibly) only for the wrong reason(s). (shrink)

n + 1 nested k-ary fixed point operators are more expressive than n. This holds on finite structures for all sublogics of partial fixed point logic PFP that can express conjunction, existential quantification and deterministic transitive closure of binary relations using at most k-ary fixed point operators and that are closed against subformulas. Among those are a lot of popular fixed point logics.

There have been spectacular villains in business that have received a great deal of attention in recent years, such as Elizabeth Holmes, Adam Neumann, and the Sackler family. All of them were supported to varying extents by others who were integral to their rise and fall, what business psychologist Max Bazerman calls "a cast of complicitors." Did those others know the extent they were contributing to unethical behaviour? How responsible were they for such behavior? In Profiles in Complicity, Bazerman explores (...) the role that others play in supporting unethical behavior in workplaces and organizations, through a host of examples such as those above, and offers a guide for readers to examine the roles they themselves may have in enabling wrongdoing and the responsibility we all have to keep harm-doers from destroying our organizations and our society. The book synthesizes scholarship from a range of disciplines, including psychology, philosophy, economics, and sociology, and provides useful approaches to thinking about all levels of complicity. Bazerman starts with a set of chapters exploring various profiles on differnet types of complicity, ranging from those who are knowing, true partners of wrong-doers to those who unknowingly benefit from systemic priviledge, or those who are overly loyal to an organization. Many readers will have witnessed people engaging in behaviors they believed were wrong, behaviors they would never engage in themselves, and then had to discern whether and how to take action. Profiles in Complicity will help readers understand the psychology of complicity, avoid being complicit in wrongdoing, and become better employees, citizens, and human beings in the process. The book will also offer direct guidance for organizations seeking to avoid ethical lapses, beyond simply looking for bad apples. (shrink)