(1993). Against essentialism in theories of rational action: A reply to Raymond Boudon. International Studies in the Philosophy of Science: Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 37-39.

Present day neuroscience places the brain at the centre of study. But what if researchers viewed the brain not as the foundation of life, rather as a mediating organ? Ecology of the Brain addresses this very question. It considers the human body as a collective, a living being which uses the brain to mediate interactions.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 12.3 (2005) 195-198 [Access article in PDF] Implicit and Explicit Temporality Thomas Fuchs Keywords implicit/explicit temporality, embodiment, intersubjectivity, desynchronization, melancholia, schizophrenia Since Minkowski (1970), Strauss (1966), v. Gebsattel (1954), and Tellenbach (1980), temporality has been a main subject of phenomenological psychiatry. Drawing on philosophical concepts of Bergson, Husserl, and Heidegger, these authors have analyzed psychopathologic deviations of time experience, mainly from an individual point (...) of view, for example, as a slowing down or inhibition of lived time in depression or obsessive–compulsive disorder. Their analyses are still most valuable today, but may be carried further by introducing concepts such as embodied and intersubjective temporality into psychopathology. Martin Wyllie (2005), by opening up a wide scope of temporal phenomena and related concepts, makes a laudable effort to contribute to such a progress.In my commentary, I would like to propose a distinction that is suggested by much of Wyllie's analysis and may shed further light on psychopathology, namely between implicit and explicit temporality. If we look at a child while obliviously playing with his toys, lost to the world, we may assume that there is no sense of the time passing. Lived time runs with the movement of life, implicit in the child's experience of being engaged in his play and directed toward his goals. It "unfolds through the processes of bodily activity" (Wyllie 2005). Future and past do not stand out against the pure presence of "becoming." This implicit mode of temporality is retrieved every time that we are absorbed in what we are doing, and may even reach the climax of "flow experiences" (Csikszentmihalyi 1988) where the sense of time is lost in unimpeded, fluent performance.However, this changes when a gap arises between need and satisfaction, desire and fulfillment, or plan and execution. Now the future appears as a "not yet" or "yet to come," experienced as the temporality of awaiting, striving, or longing for. Time is felt as passing by and refusing the desired fulfillment; it becomes conscious or explicit. A similar gap arises between the present and something irretrievably lost, bringing the past to consciousness as a "no more." Again time is experienced explicitly, but now as moving on relentlessly and separating us from the lost object. The gap to the past may not be bridged any more: this is the temporality of missing or mourning. In both cases, explicit time arises as a negation of implicit or lived time (here my use of the term is a bit divergent from Wyllie's); it is experienced as a "not yet" or "no more," often with a component of displeasure or suffering (Fuchs 2001a, 2003)."Implicit" versus "explicit time" thus come near to another distinction well known in phenomenology, namely between the "lived" and [End Page 195] the "corporal body" (Leib versus Koerper). The first term refers to the body functioning in the tacit mode, as the medium of everyday performance. The second term points to the body as turning into the object of attention, for example, when it puts up resistance to our purposes, or is used as an instrument deliberately (Fuchs 2001b). In fact, implicit temporality and tacit performance of the body are nearly synonymous: Lived time may be regarded as a function of the lived body, opened up by its potentiality and capability. The more we are engaged in our tasks, the more we forget time as well as the body; we are, as it were, "inside time." On the other hand, in explicit temporality the body often appears in the corporal or explicit mode as well. For example, when falling ill, we experience our body no more as a tacit medium but rather as an object or obstacle, while we notice the slowing down of time and may even feel excluded from the movement of life. Thus, embodiment and temporality have a parallel background–foreground structure.I now try to carry these considerations further by including the intersubjective dimension of time. In an earlier paper, I describe the attunement of the living being to its environment as a continuous synchronization on the biological as... (shrink)

Despite its complex experiential structure, the phenomenon of grief following bereavement has not been a major topic of phenomenological research. The paper investigates its basic structures, elaborating as its core characteristic a conflict between a presentifying and a ‘de-presentifying’ intention: In grief, the subject experiences a fundamental ambiguity between presence and absence of the deceased, between the present and the past, indeed between two worlds he lives in. This phenomenological structure will be analyzed under several aspects: regarding bodily experience, as (...) disruption of a shared intercorporeality; as a loss of the shared world and shared habitualities, leaving the bereaved person with ubiquitous indications of absence and with a contraction of their own self; regarding temporality, as a separation of two strands of time, namely a still ongoing past and an alienated present which become more and more desynchronized; finally, as an “as-if presence” of the deceased which the bereaved continue to feel and sometimes to perceive, leading to a cognitive-affective conflict between two experienced realities. The transforming process of grief is then analyzed as a gradual adjustment to the loss, finally enabling a re-integration of the conflicting realities. This is achieved through an incorporation and identification with the deceased on the one hand, and through various forms of representation on the other hand, in particular by recollection and symbolization. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 8.4 (2001) 323-326 [Access article in PDF] The Tacit Dimension Thomas Fuchs Thirty years after its appearance, Blankenburg's "Psychopathology of common sense" has not lost its relevance. In my commentary I will try to illustrate the fruitfulness of his approach by pointing to some connections with the phenomenology of the body as well as with recent memory and infant research.As Blankenburg himself indicates, the (...) notion of common sense developed by a shift of meaning from the classical sensus communis and thus has its original basis in the sensual-bodily experience. By the koinè aísthesis, Aristoteles meant a central sense organ integrating all single modalities of sensation (which he localized in the heart). In German physiology and psychiatry of the nineteenth century, the sensus communis was still translated as "Gemeingefühl" ("common feeling") or "cenesthesia" (Fuchs 1995). This term denoted the inner, proprioceptive bodily sensations, but also an original unity of the senses, which has been rediscovered by recent infant research as intermodal sensory perception. The affection of the body was thus regarded as the common basis of all sensation.Looking on this track for a bodily basis of the common sense, we find it in the habitual structure of the lived-body as analysed by Merleau-Ponty (1945). The body is the primary "matter-of-course," namely, the tacitly functioning medium of our everyday being-in-the-world prior to any subject-object split. The body schema, in Merleau-Ponty's view, is not only a system of familiar units of movement or "kinetic melodies," it also incorporates the surrounding things, tools, and spaces that are familiar to us and that we "inhabit." Thus, the musician "does not only manipulate the instrument like a separate object, but lives in it like a limb and inhabits the expressive musical space it opens" (Behnke 1997). But for Merleau-Ponty, the body schema is also the basis of "intercorporeity," i.e., a prepersonal sphere of reciprocal comportment and understanding prior to any explicit consensus and symbolic communication. In this sphere of elementary contact, the "atmospheric" senses play a major role: The sense of smell (as shown, e.g., by the expression "to scent treason" or in German, "jemand nicht riechen können" [not be able to "smell" or stand someone]) as well as the sense of taste whose ambiguous meaning, mentioned by Blankenburg, points to the bodily basis of the feeling for what is suitable, decent, or aesthetically pleasing. Even the designation of homo sapiens that we give to ourselves is derived from the latin sapere (to taste/to know), and thus shows that the knowledge characteristic for man is not an explicit one, but an intuitive, implicit knowing or "feel" for his surroundings, or as Kant says, an "aesthetic rather than intellectual judgment" (cited by Blankenburg).Polanyi (1967) has analysed this knowledge at the roots of common sense as "tacit knowledge." It is based on processes of Gestalt formation that enable us to grasp unified wholes through their constituting elements without still being aware of the latter. Thus, we understand the facial expression of others immediately but cannot tell from which details. Or we know how [End Page 323] to waltz without knowing the single movements or being able to explain it. Tacit knowledge implies all the taken-for-granted that we have forgotten once it has become our second nature and part of our bodily habits. It is mainly based on the neuronal coupling of single sensori-motor units by repeated perception or action. This unconscious knowing has only recently come to be explored by psychology under the heading of "implicit" or "procedural memory" (Schacter 1987, 1996). It contains familiar styles or "melodies" of moving, perceiving, and being-with-others in which our whole bodily and emotional experience is engaged. There is an atmospheric, "felt" quality about them that cannot be analysed into single elements. Implicit knowledge may, therefore, never be wholly expressed by words—it is only realized in the concrete situation. It may only be circumscribed by expressions such as "how it feels...," "how it is...," e.g., how it is... (shrink)

Current theories of social cognition are mainly based on a representationalist view. Moreover, they focus on a rather sophisticated and limited aspect of understanding others, i.e. on how we predict and explain others’ behaviours through representing their mental states. Research into the ‘social brain’ has also favoured a third-person paradigm of social cognition as a passive observation of others’ behaviour, attributing it to an inferential, simulative or projective process in the individual brain. In this paper, we present a concept of (...) social understanding as an ongoing, dynamical process of participatory sense-making and mutual incorporation. This process may be described (1) from a dynamical agentive systems point of view as an interaction and coordination of two embodied agents; (2) from a phenomenological approach as a mutual incorporation, i.e. a process in which the lived bodies of both participants extend and form a common intercorporality. Intersubjectivity, it is argued, is not a solitary task of deciphering or simulating the movements of others but means entering a process of embodied interaction and generating common meaning through it. This approach will be further illustrated by an analysis of primary dyadic interaction in early childhood. (shrink)

The structure of human embodiment is fundamentally characterized by a polarity or ambiguity between Leib and Körper, the subjective body and the objectified body, or between being-body and having-a-body. This ambiguity, emphasized, above all, by Helmuth Plessner and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, is also of crucial significance for psychopathology. Insofar as mental illnesses disturb or interrupt the unhindered conduct of one’s life, they also exacerbate the tension within embodiment that holds between being-body and having-a-body. In mental illnesses, there is a failure of (...) tacit mediations upon which one’s bodily being-toward-the-world is based. Instead of serving as a medium of relating to the world, the body makes .. (shrink)

The ethical ideologies of psychologists and physicians were compared using the Ethics Position Questionnaire. The findings reveal that psychologists tend to be less relativistic than physicians. Further, we explored the degree to which physicians and psychologists report being influenced by a variety of factors in their ethical decision making. Psychologists were more influenced by their code of ethics and less influenced by family views, religious background, and peer attitudes than were physicians. We argue that these differences reflect the varied professional (...) cultures in which practitioners are trained and socialized. (shrink)

The paper first introduces the concept of implicit and explicit temporality, referring to time as pre-reflectively lived vs. consciously experienced. Implicit time is based on the constitutive synthesis of inner time consciousness on the one hand, and on the conative–affective dynamics of life on the other hand. Explicit time results from an interruption or negation of implicit time and unfolds itself in the dimensions of present, past and future. It is further shown that temporality, embodiment and intersubjectivity are closely connected: (...) While implicit temporality is characterised by tacit bodily functioning and by synchronisation with others, explicit temporality arises with states of desynchronisation, that is, of a retardation or acceleration of inner time in relation to external or social processes. These states often bring the body to awareness as an obstacle as well. On this basis, schizophrenia and melancholic depression are investigated as paradigm cases for a psychopathology of temporality. Major symptoms of schizophrenia such as thought disorder, thought insertion, hallucinations or passivity experiences may be regarded as manifesting a disturbance of the constitutive synthesis of time consciousness, closely connected with a weakening of the underlying pre-reflective self-awareness or ipseity. This results in a fragmentation of the intentional arc, a loss of self-coherence and the appearance of major self-disturbances. Depression, on the other hand, is mostly triggered by a desynchronisation from the social environment and further develops into an inhibition of the conative–affective dynamics of life. As will be shown, both mental illnesses bear witness of the close connection of temporality, embodiment and intersubjectivity. (shrink)

There is a conspicuous tendency of humans to experience empathy and sympathy preferentially towards members of their own group, whereas empathetic feelings towards outgroup members or strangers are often reduced or even missing. This may culminate in a “dissociation of empathy”: a historical example are the cases of Nazi perpetrators who behaved as compassionate family men on the one hand, yet committed crimes of utter cruelty against Jews on the other. The paper aims at explaining such phenomena and at determining (...) the limits of empathy. To this purpose, it first distinguishes between two levels of empathy, namely primary or intercorporeal and extended or higher-level empathy. It then investigates the mutual interconnection of empathy and recognition, which may be regarded as a principle of extending empathy to others regardless of whether they belong to one’s own group or not. However, this principle is in conflict with ingroup conformism and outgroup biases that hamper the universal extension of empathy. Thus, a denial of recognition and exclusion of others from one’s ingroup usually results in a withdrawal or lack of extended empathy which then influences primary empathy as well. On this basis, and using the historical example of mass executions during the Holocaust, the paper investigates the mechanisms of exclusion which may lead to a withdrawal of recognition and finally to a dissociation of empathy. (shrink)

Schizophrenia is a mental disorder that calls the mineness of one's own sensations, thoughts and actions into question and threatens the person with a loss of self. In order to understand this illness in its essence, an approach based on phenomenological psychopathology is therefore indispensable. Conversely, disorders of the self in schizophrenia should be of crucial interest for any philosophy of subjectivity in order to test its concepts of self-awareness, personhood and intersubjectivity by reference to empirical phenomena.Contemporary neurobiological concepts of (...) schizophrenia predominantly emphasize the importance of impaired integration of somatosensory inputs into stable central-nervous representations... (shrink)

The effects of the forcing axioms \, \ and \ on the failure of weak threaded square principles of the form \\) are analyzed. To this end, a diagonal reflection principle, \, and it implies the failure of \\) if \. It is also shown that this result is sharp. It is noted that \/\ imply the failure of \\), for every regular \, and that this result is sharp as well.

The paper first gives a conceptual distinction of the first, second and third person perspectives in social cognition research and connects them to the major present theories of understanding others (simulation, interaction and theory theory). It then argues for a foundational role of second person interactions for the development of social perspectives. To support this thesis, the paper analyzes in detail how infants, in particular through triangular interactions with persons and objects, expand their understanding of perspectives and arrive at a (...) self–other metaperspective. This allows them to grasp the other’s as well as their own perspective as such, which is equivalent to an explicit third person perspective and to an explicit first person perspective or self-consciousness. The paper describes the major steps towards these perspectives, pointing to a close interdependence of both developments. It argues that embodied second person interactions are not only an enabling, but the constitutive condition for the development of an explicit first and third person perspective. (shrink)

From a phenomenological viewpoint, shame and guilt may be regarded as emotions which have incorporated the gaze and the voice of the other, respectively. The spontaneous and unreflected performance of the primordial bodily self has suffered a rupture: In shame or guilt we are rejected, separated from the others, and thrown back on ourselves. This reflective turn of spontaneous experience is connected with an alienation of primordial bodiliness that may be described as a "corporealization": The lived-body is changed into the (...) objective, corporeal body or "body-for-others." The polarity of "bodiliness" and "corporeality" may further a phenomenological understanding of several mental disorders connected with shame and guilt. This is shown by the examples of body dysmorphic disorder and melancholic depression. (shrink)

In the quantum-Bayesian approach to quantum foundations, a quantum state is viewed as an expression of an agent’s personalist Bayesian degrees of belief, or probabilities, concerning the results of measurements. These probabilities obey the usual probability rules as required by Dutch-book coherence, but quantum mechanics imposes additional constraints upon them. In this paper, we explore the question of deriving the structure of quantum-state space from a set of assumptions in the spirit of quantum Bayesianism. The starting point is the representation (...) of quantum states induced by a symmetric informationally complete measurement or SIC. In this representation, the Born rule takes the form of a particularly simple modification of the law of total probability. We show how to derive key features of quantum-state space from (i) the requirement that the Born rule arises as a simple modification of the law of total probability and (ii) a limited number of additional assumptions of a strong Bayesian flavor. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 9.3 (2002) 261-264 [Access article in PDF] Mind, Meaning, and the Brain Thomas Fuchs, MD, PhD Keywords: Mind, brain, meaning, translation, depression. A Systemic View of the Mind Progress in brain research over the past two decades demonstrates the power of the neurobiological paradigm. However, this progress is connected with a restricted field of vision typical of any scientific paradigm. The psychiatrist should be (...) aware of this restriction, because, unlike the brain scientist, he deals with patients, not with brains. The restricted view may be described by the terms of (1) reductionism, (2) reification, and (3) isolation.Reductionism: Neurobiology tends to regard subjectivity as a mere by-product of the brain's activity as a symbol-manipulating machine or an information processor. Consciousness becomes an epiphenomon of the neuronal machinery that, operating behind our back, creates the illusion of a continuous self and of an autonomous will (Churchland 1995; Roth 1996).Reification: Mental or subjective states seem to be localizable in the brain; thoughts or feelings, it appears, may be observed in the colored illumination of cortical and subcortical structures. This results in the belief that brain images could also show the cause of a mental illness, or even the illness itself, which then manifests, for instance, in a reduced metabolic activity in certain areas of the cortex.Isolation: As a further consequence, this view isolates the individual patient and considers his illness separated from the interconnections with his environment. However, on these interconnections his personal experiences and dispositions are founded, and it is the actual interpersonal situation that has triggered his present illness.Walter Glannon's paper successfully counters these tendencies toward a neurobiological reductionism with an extended view of the mind: "... the mind is not located in any one place but is distributed among the brain, the body, and the environment." Of course, who observes someone's brain will never see his thoughts, his pain, or his anxiety. For consciousness is not a localizable object or state at all but a process of relating to something: a perceiving of, remembering of, wishing for, aiming at, and so on. Thus on the phenomenological level, there is nothing like a "mental event" that could be isolated from the world and from the stream of conscious experiences. The mind exists only embedded in the world and in the temporal process of life.The same applies to the biological level: Consciousness is based on the continuous interaction of the brain with the organism, and of the organism as a whole with the environment. The role of the brain for mental phenomena is thus comparable to the role of the heart in the circulatory system or of the lung in the respiratory system. Of course, the lung is the central organ of breathing, but respiration may not be restricted to the [End Page 261] lung, nor to the organism as a whole. It means constant exchange with the environment, and there is no sense in asking whether the air taken in still belongs to the surroundings or already to the organism. The same systemic unity is found in the circle of perception and action mediated by the brain: When I am writing a letter, there is no place in the unity of action where my "self" ends and the "world" begins, no border that separates inner and outer worlds.There is another argument to be raised against the reification of the mind if we consider the aspect of a historical biology. From birth on, our mind as well as the correlated brain structures are essentially formed by social and cultural influences. The brain is not inserted into the world as a prefabricated apparatus but through its plastic development in and from the world. Thus it adapts epigenetically to its specific natural and social environment like a key to a lock. This complementarity makes it impossible to restrict one's view to the anatomic organ and requires an interdisciplinary approach to brain-environment investigation, as for example, under the heading of a "social cognitive neuroscience" (Ochsner and Lieberman 2001).As Glannon goes on to argue, to overcome... (shrink)

Ehrenfeucht’s lemma asserts that whenever one element of a model of Peano arithmetic is definable from another, they satisfy different types. We consider here the analogue of Ehrenfeucht’s lemma for models of set theory. The original argument applies directly to the ordinal-definable elements of any model of set theory, and, in particular, Ehrenfeucht’s lemma holds fully for models of set theory satisfying V=HOD. We show that the lemma fails in the forcing extension of the universe by adding a Cohen real. (...) We go on to formulate a scheme of natural parametric generalizations of Ehrenfeucht’s lemma, namely, the principles of the form EL, which asserts that P-definability from A implies Q-discernibility. We also consider various analogues of Ehrenfeucht’s lemma obtained by using algebraicity in place of definability, where a set b is algebraic in a if it is a member of a finite set definable from a. Ehrenfeucht’s lemma holds for the ordinal-algebraic sets, we prove, if and only if the ordinal-algebraic and ordinal-definable sets coincide. Using a similar analysis, we answer two open questions posed earlier by the third author and C. Leahy, showing that algebraicity and definability need not coincide in models of set theory and the internal and external notions of being ordinal algebraic need not coincide. (shrink)

For an ordinal \, I introduce a variant of the notion of subcompleteness of a forcing poset, which I call \-subcompleteness, and show that this class of forcings enjoys some closure properties that the original class of subcomplete forcings does not seem to have: factors of \-subcomplete forcings are \-subcomplete, and if \ and \ are forcing-equivalent notions, then \ is \-subcomplete iff \ is. I formulate a Two Step Theorem for \-subcompleteness and prove an RCS iteration theorem for \-subcompleteness (...) which is slightly less restrictive than the original one, in that its formulation is more careful about the amount of collapsing necessary. Finally, I show that an adequate degree of \-subcompleteness follows from the \-distributivity of a forcing, for \. (shrink)

Problems and choices -- Who shall live? -- The physician : the captain of the team -- The hospital : the house of hope -- Drugs : the key to modern medicine -- Paying for medical care.

Continuing the work of Fuchs [1], I show that the translation functions developed previously map iterable λ-structures to iterable s-structures and vice versa. To this end, I analyse how the translation functions interact with the formation of extender ultrapowers and normal iterations. This analysis makes it possible to translate iterations, and, in a last step, iteration strategies, thus arriving at the result.

I analyze the hierarchies of the bounded and the weak bounded forcing axioms, with a focus on their versions for the class of subcomplete forcings, in terms of implications and consistency strengths. For the weak hierarchy, I provide level-by-level equiconsistencies with an appropriate hierarchy of partially remarkable cardinals. I also show that the subcomplete forcing axiom implies Larson’s ordinal reflection principle atω2, and that its effect on the failure of weak squares is very similar to that of Martin’s Maximum.

Critics have charged that John Stuart Mill''s discussion as of paternalism in On Liberty is internally inconsistent, noting, for example, the numerous instances in which Mill explicitly endorses examples of paternalistic coercion. Similarly, commentators have noted an apparent contradiction between Mill''s political liberalism – according to which the state should be neutral among competing conceptions of the good – and Mill''s condemnation of non-autonomous ways of life, such as that of a servile wife. More generally, critics have argued that while (...) Mill professes an allegiance to utilitarianism, he actually abandons it in favor of a view that values personal autonomy as the greatest intrinsic good. This paper presents an interpretation of Mill that provides a viable and consistent treatment of paternalism, thereby refuting each of the aforementioned critiques. Mill''s views, it argues, are consistently utilitarian. Moreover, the interpretation accounts for all of Mill''s departures from his otherwise blanket prohibition of paternalistic legislation. In particular, it explains his most notorious example, the condemnation of voluntary contracts for slavery. The interpretation emphasizes Mill''s conceptual linkage between autonomy and utility, noting his implicit use of at least three different senses of the notion of autonomy. (shrink)

The articles in this volume offer a fresh perspective on the important role of the concept of law (lex) in the moral and political philosophy of the 'School of Salamanca'.

PurposeThere are a lot of discussions about privacy in relation to contemporary communication systems (such as Facebook and other “social media” platforms), but discussions about privacy on the internet in most cases misses a profound understanding of the notion of privacy and where this notion is coming from. The purpose of this paper is to challenge the liberal notion of privacy and explore foundations of an alternative privacy conception.Design/methodology/approachA typology of privacy definitions is elaborated based on Giddens' theory of structuration. (...) The concept of privacy fetishism that is based on critical political economy is introduced. Limits of the liberal concept of privacy are discussed. This discussion is connected to the theories of Marx, Arendt and Habermas. Some foundations of an alternative privacy concept are outlined.FindingsThe notion of privacy fetishism is introduced for criticizing naturalistic accounts of privacy. Marx and Engels have advanced four elements of the critique of the liberal privacy concept that were partly taken up by Arendt and Habermas: privacy as atomism that advances; possessive individualism that harms the public good; legitimizes and reproduces the capitalist class structure; and capitalist patriarchy.Research limitations/implicationsGiven the criticisms advanced in this paper, the need for an alternative, socialist privacy concept is ascertained and it is argued that privacy rights should be differentiated according to the position individuals occupy in the power structure, so that surveillance makes transparent wealth and income gaps and company's profits and privacy protects workers and consumers from capitalist domination.Originality/valueThe paper contributes to the establishment of a concept of privacy that is grounded in critical political economy. Owing to the liberal bias of the privacy concept, the theorization of privacy has thus far been largely ignored in critical political economy. The paper contributes to illuminating this blind spot. (shrink)

The unity of thinking and acting (saying and doing) will be assumed as a fundamental hypothesis for a biography of Fichte, allowing one to understand the different stages in J.G. Fichte’s life. Die Einheit von Denken und Handeln (Sagen und Tun) wird als Grundhypothese für eine Biographie Fichtes angenommen, aus der sich die Etappen des Lebens von J.G. Fichte verstehen lassen sollen.

The probabilities a Bayesian agent assigns to a set of events typically change with time, for instance when the agent updates them in the light of new data. In this paper we address the question of how an agent's probabilities at different times are constrained by Dutch-book coherence. We review and attempt to clarify the argument that, although an agent is not forced by coherence to use the usual Bayesian conditioning rule to update his probabilities, coherence does require the agent's (...) probabilities to satisfy van Fraassen's [1984] reflection principle (which entails a related constraint pointed out by Goldstein [1983]). We then exhibit the specialized assumption needed to recover Bayesian conditioning from an analogous reflection-style consideration. Bringing the argument to the context of quantum measurement theory, we show that "quantum decoherence" can be understood in purely personalist terms---quantum decoherence (as supposed in a von Neumann chain) is not a physical process at all, but an application of the reflection principle. From this point of view, the decoherence theory of Zeh, Zurek, and others as a story of quantum measurement has the plot turned exactly backward. (shrink)

Die Frage nach dem Verhältnis Osteuropas zum Westen ist nicht nur aktueller denn je, sondern hat auch eine lange und ambivalente Geschichte. Diese hing jeweils stark von den Selbstwahrnehmungen der beteiligten Kulturen ab. Brücken bauen beschäftigt sich nicht nur mit den Selbst- und Fremdwahrnehmungen aus historischer, literaturwissenschaftlicher, philosophischer und politikwissenschaftlicher Sicht, sondern beleuchtet auch die Beziehungen zwischen West und Ost sowie gemeinsame ebenso wie jeweils eigene Phänomene und Strömungen. Mit den Beiträgen soll Leonid Luks, Direktor des Zentralinstitutes für Mittel- und (...) Osteuropastudien an der Katholischen Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt und einer der fleißigsten Brückenbauer zwischen Ost und West, zu seinem 65. Geburtstag geehrt werden. So spiegelt Brücken bauen Luks' eigene Forschungsschwerpunkte wider. Dabei vereinigt der Band Analysen, Aufsätze, Skizzen und Gedanken etwa zu Fragen der vergleichenden Totalitarismusforschung, der Ideengeschichte und der Aufarbeitung des kommunistischen Erbes in Osteuropa solch etablierter Wissenschaftler, Philosophen und Persönlichkeiten wie Uwe Backes, Boris Chavkin, Jerzy Holzer, Heinz Hürten, Nikolaus Lobkowicz, Bernhard Sutor und Hans-Georg Wieck. (shrink)

Der vorliegende Band gibt in neunzehn Beiträgen den aktuellen Stand der wissenschaftlichen Diskussion zu Willensfreiheit, Determinismus und Verantwortlichkeit in praktischen Kontexten wieder. Er klärt zunächst die genannten Begriffe, um dann die wichtigsten Methoden und Ergebnisse der Hirnforschung zu präsentieren. Diese Forschungsergebnisse werden im Weiteren philosophisch interpretiert und innerhalb ethischer Koordinaten bestimmt. Abschließende Beiträge reflektieren ihre Anwendung auf die Gebiete der Rechtssprechung und Demenzforschung. Damit eröffnet der Band ein breites Spektrum interdisziplinärer Perspektiven auf ein vieldiskutiertes Thema.

I develop a translation procedure between λ-structures, which correspond to premice in the Friedman–Jensen indexing convention on the one hand and s-structures, which are essentially the same as premice in the Mitchell–Steel indexing scheme.

l investigate versions of the Maximality Principles for the classes of forcings which are <κ-closed. <κ-directed-closed, or of the form Col (κ. <Λ). These principles come in many variants, depending on the parameters which are allowed. I shall write MPΓ(A) for the maximality principle for forcings in Γ, with parameters from A. The main results of this paper are: • The principles have many consequences, such as <κ-closed-generic $\Sigma _{2}^{1}(H_{\kappa})$ absoluteness, and imply. e.g., that ◇κ holds. I give an application (...) to the automorphism tower problem, showing that there are Souslin trees which are able to realize any equivalence relation, and hence that there are groups whose automorphism tower is highly sensitive to forcing. • The principles can be separated into a hierarchy which is strict, for many κ. • Some of the principles can be combined, in the sense that they can hold at many different κ simultaneously. The possibilities of combining the principles are limited, though: While it is consistent that MP<κ-closed(HκT) holds at all regular κ below any fixed α. the "global" maximality principle, stating that MP<κ-closed(Hκ ∪ {κ}) holds at every regular κ. is inconsistent. In contrast to this, it is equiconsistent with ZFC that the maximality principle for directed-closed forcings without any parameters holds at every regular cardinal. It is also consistent that every local statement with parameters from HκT that's provably <κ-closed-forceably necessary is true, for all regular κ. (shrink)