Roland Reichenbach; On Irritation and Transformation: A–teleological Bildung and its Significance for the Democratic Form of Living, Journal of Philosophy of Ed.

The concept of hope—as used in ordinary language in assertions of (for example) the form ›Person S hopes that p‹—can be analysed in terms of belief, desire, and, as I claim, affective quality. According to my analysis, one feature of hope is that what S hopes for has some subjective probability for S. Hope thus has an epistemic component on which demands of rationality can be (and, as a matter of fact, are) placed. Ordinary language distinguishes various types of deficient (...) hoping. On the basis of my explication of ›hope‹, it can be shown that types of deficient hope differ in the way in which they violate rationality. A particularly interesting type of deficient hoping is self-deceptive hope. Self-deception centrally involves the formation or retention of beliefs under the influence of biasing motivational factors. And hope, through its conative component, contains just such a motivation for self-deception. Hope is thus closely, if only contingently, connected with self-deception: not all hope is self-deceptive, but it is natural and presumably rather common for hopes to involve self-deception. Hope’s susceptibility to self-deception is one of the primary reasons why hope has been the subject of ambivalent or even negative valuation, the main conflict being the one between (important) benefits of hoping and the value of truth. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 1, February 2019, Page 20-39.

A woman is found lying dead on the floor of the living room of her house in Leiden, the Netherlands, and because of a swollen and a slightly wounded eyelid, an autopsy is performed on the body the day after it is found. Behind the wound, there is a whole ballpoint pen, which entered the head of the deceased through her right eye causing mortal brain damage. How did it get there? This question was to cause a stir in Dutch (...) society, holding a group of police detectives and several scientists in its grip for several years. In this article, the ballpoint case is analyzed as to the boundary work between credible and noncredible expertise. As it is often assumed that boundary work in continental law is preempted by the structure of these law models, this case study adds a comparative note to the growing literature about science and the law. (shrink)

How is distributive justice possible with respect to immigration if political decisions about entry and membership cannot be grounded in the symmetry of a prior commonality, human or otherwise, that could guarantee reciprocal relations between members and nonmembers? This paper deals with both aspects of this question. Initially, it engages critically with Seyla Benhabib's plea for ‘dialogical universalism,’ showing why the strong discontinuity between political and moral reciprocity precludes understanding distributive justice as the process of mediating between political particularity and (...) moral universality. Subsequently, it suggests that a way out of this conceptual and normative impasse can be found in the fact that boundaries create a double asymmetry. This double asymmetry is constitutive for the ‘dia’ of the political dialogue that separates and joins members and nonmembers. This ‘in between,’ which eludes control by the parties to a dialogue, is the realm of distributive justice. (shrink)

If the Bucolics as a whole ‘ look on us with dark enigmatical eyes,’ for long no more impenetrable darkness and no more compelling enigma could be found than that of the fourth poem in the collection. But Skutsch, the authors of Virgil's Messianic Eclogue, and more recently Mr. Royds in his Virgil and Isaiah, have done much to solve its many mysteries. Their efforts, however, were mainly directed towards the problems of fact contained in the Eclogue, and so far (...) little attention seems to have been given to an equally interesting point, that of its metrical arrangement. It is plain that we must consult the Sibyll for help: if it is not plain, that is not Virgil's fault. I hope to be able to show here that Virgil himself has left in this poem certain unmistakeable signs for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, besides his own rather casual reference to the Cumaeum carmen, and incidentally to dispose anew of the theory which reads in that expression an allusion not to the Sibyl but to Hesiod. (shrink)

Ordinary Language Philosophy has largely fallen out of favour, and with it the belief in the primary importance of analyses of ordinary language for philosophical purposes. Still, in their various endeavours, philosophers not only from analytic but also from other backgrounds refer to the use and meaning of terms of interest in ordinary parlance. In doing so, they most commonly appeal to their own linguistic intuitions. Often, the appeal to individual intuitions is supplemented by reference to dictionaries. In recent times, (...) Internet search engine queries for expressions of interest have become quite popular. Apparently, philosophers attempt to surpass the limits of their own linguistic intuitions by appealing to experts or to factual uses of language. I argue that this attempt is commendable but that its execution is wanting. Instead of appealing to dictionaries or Internet queries, philosophers should employ computer-based linguistic corpora in order to confirm or falsify hypotheses about the factual use of language. This approach also has some advantages over methods employed by experimental philosophers. If the importance of ordinary language is stressed, the use of linguistic corpora is hardly avoidable. (shrink)

v. 1. Relation and logical formula.--v. 2. Model theory.

Working with Old High German and Old Saxon texts has become rare in German language and literature studies. Nowadays, the brief introductions to historical linguistics and philology do not suffice to enable students to explore the oldest German texts in significant depth. A new tool could at least help move closer to this dept of textual exploration: an on-line publication of all Old High German and Old Saxon texts with a morphological word-by-word annotation. The data has been collected by the (...) research project ‘Old German Reference Corpus’ (‘Referenzkorpus Altdeutsch’ / ReA) and can already be used for complex database queries. Within the framework of the ‘eHumanities Centre for Historical Lexicography’ (eHumanities-Zentrum für Historische Lexikographie / ZHistLex), it has been converted into a clearly arranged format, focusing on the information needed for comprehending the texts: the ‘Lesekorpus Altdeutsch’ (LeA). This tool can of course not replace the work with text editions, translations and commentaries, but will help pave the way from the first insight into the language to a profound understanding. Additionally, a supplemental both-way linking between every word token and the corresponding entry in the on-line dictionaries of historical German is being prepared. (shrink)

Postcolonial theoretical examinations on the translation of the Bible in Africa have revealed the systematic process of domination and restructuring of the worldview of Africans. The colonial agenda that coloured the missiological thrust influenced the choice of words and concepts used to translate the Scriptures. By examining the word Elohim in Psalm 82, this article highlights how this development is realised in the translation of the Asante Twi Bible. For instance, in Psalm 82, the plural Elohim has been translated as (...) anyame in the Asante Twi Bible, a translation that is not only inappropriate but alters the religious worldview of the Asante people. As a mission agenda, the term anyame was coined to redefine the religion of the Akan people as polytheism. This redefinition has had a profound and longstanding impact on the language and religious thinking of the people. At the least, this article recommends a constructive reading of Psalm 82 in the Asante Twi Bible in order to decolonise it from colonial impositions that sought to wrongly qualify the life and thought of the people. At the most, the article calls on African biblical scholars to pay more attention to the impact of colonialism in their interpretation of the Bible in order to draw attention to changes in structure of the indigenous language and thought patterns, and to look for creative ways to redeem traditions of the African people.Contribution: The study demonstrates the continuous need to decolonise the Bible in Africa in order to help recover some of Africa’s religio-cultural identity lost during the missionary drive. (shrink)

In this article, the author analyses Cernuda’s long poem “Lazaro”, in order to elucidate the inner relation between desire and reality that is central in his entire work. That relation is important not only in order to understand how imagination influences poetical creation, but also how poetical creativity acquires its autonomy and independency.

Report on the workshop "Empirical Methods of Linguistics in Philosophy", which took place at TU Dortmund University, Germany, on March 13–14, 2014.

This book describes what an “art of multiculturalism” could be and how in turn multiculturalism could be conceived as a form of art. It focuses on the early and middle work of Indian-born U.S. writer Bharati Mukherjee, in particular on her understanding of the “fusion” of literature and painting as a tool to inspire the creation of a “new global society” by empowering minorities through fostering and multiplying “differences in unity” and “unities in difference”. The book includes, in condensed ways, (...) an explanation of Mukherjee’s use of ancient Indian painting techniques for postmodern writing; and it provides a short introduction to the relation between multiculturalism, postmodernity and “imaginal politics”. The book is written in an easy to read style accessible to all interested in the topic: high school and university students and teachers; those generally interested in the interface between literature, the arts and politics; and specialists in multicultural studies and global and international studies. The book is particularly suited to use in teaching. (shrink)

Translation exercises are useful for teaching philosophical writing in higher education, but are not commonly used for this purpose. The article details the benefits such exercises may have for the motivation of students and for the improvement of their writing skills, particularly the kind of linguistic scrutiny required in much, if not all of philosophy. By way of example, some experiences with teaching J. L. Austin’s "How to Do Things With Words" in this way are discussed.

Utopien beschreiben andere Verhältnisse, um reale Gesellschaften zu kritisieren oder Alternativen zu ihnen zu entwerfen. Sie können ernst sein oder spielerisch. Alle Formen und Realitätsbezüge des Utopischen haben ihren Ort. Aber wir möchten für eine bestimmte Spielart plädieren: Angewandten Utopismus.

Lässt sich Kunst definieren? Von vielen analytischen Kunstphilosophen wird das bezweifelt. Für sie ist der Kunstbegriff ein “offener Begriff”, der auf unterschiedlichste Phänomene angewandt werden kann, selbst wenn diese keine gemeinsame Eigenschaft miteinander verbindet. Wer danach fragt, was Kunst denn eigentlich sei, verkennt in ihren Augen das Wesen des Kunstbegriffs. Träfe diese Auffassung zu, wären philosophische Theorien über das Wesen der Kunst bloße Spekulation. Der Streit um den Kunstbegriff, der bis heute nicht beigelegt ist, ist deshalb ein Streit um die (...) Grundlagen und die Möglichkeit einer Ästhetik der Kunst. Der Band stellt die wichtigsten Protagonisten dieses Streits in Aufsätzen vor, die hier größtenteils zum ersten Mal in deutscher Übersetzung vorliegen. Er enthält Beiträge von Berys Gaut, William E. Kennick, Maurice Mandelbaum, Robert J. Matthews, Robert Stecker, Morris Weitz und Paul Ziff. (shrink)

The volume contains a selection of papers read in the sections of GAP.5, the Fifth International Congress of the Society for Analytical Philosophy, which took place 22–26 September 2003 at the University of Bielefeld, Germany. The overall theme of the congress was “Philosophy – Science – Scientific Philosophy, but the papers address a wide variety of topics from various fields of philosophy.

Quine ist ein Klassiker der Gegenwartsphilosophie. Doch Quine erläutert nichts und erklärt wenig. Der von ihm angenommene Leser etwa seiner berühmten Aufsatz-Sammlung From a Logical Point of View ist der Fachkollege, der ebenso wie Quine die jeweilige aktuelle Debatte genau kennt. Die vorliegende zweisprachige und vor allem vollständig durchkommentierte Ausgabe legt drei seiner wichtigsten Aufsätze aus dieser Sammlung (On What There Is / Über was es gibt, Two Dogmas of Empiricism / Zwei Dogmen des Empirismus und Reference and Modality / (...) Referenz und Modalität) vor. Auf diese Weise kann sich jeder Leser mit diesen gedanklich faszinierenden Texten beschäftigen. (shrink)

Marxist contributions to biblical criticism are far more sustained and complex than many would expect. This critical survey of the state of play, with a look back at the main currents that have led to that state, deals with Marxist contributions to the reconstructions of biblical societies and the interpretation of the literature produced by those societies. It begins by outlining the major Marxist positions within current biblical criticism and then moves on to consider two possible sources of further insight (...) from outside biblical criticism: Western-Marxist studies of the ancient world and the long and neglected tradition of Soviet-era Russian work on the ancient Near East. I conclude by pointing to a number of lingering problems: the unreliability of the literature for historical purposes; the lack of fit between juridical distinctions in the literature and class distinctions in the ancient world; the question as to whether the state can be a class; and the viability of imposing on the ancient world Marxist categories developed in very different situations. (shrink)

Examples of such powers are the art of building houses and the art of medicine. The actualities correlated with such powers are the construction of a house and the healing of a someone who is sick, which occur respectively in the bricks and ...