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Leading one’s life as a person is an essential feature of our human existence which is constitutively characterized by finiteness, sociality and vulnerability. Within the framework of a pragmatistic anthropology central features of our being persons (i.e. personal identity, self-consciousness, freedom, autonomy and responsibility) are made explicit in this study. The such unfolded conception is anthropological in the sense of being restricted to the human life-form. The explication is pragmatistic in a double sense: Firstly, action is taken as a complex and not reducible basic feature; secondly, the study is committed to the pragmatistic model of justification. Leading one’s life as a human person, this is the study’s central thesis, is realized in constellations of recognition (intersubjective or institutionally framed). These can be made explicit as basic grammar of our evaluative Praxis within an ascriptivist framework.
The Liar paradox arises when we consider a sentence that says of itself that it is not true. If such self-referential sentences exist – and examples like »This sentence is not true« certainly suggest this –, then our logic and standard notion of truth allow to infer a contradiction: The Liar sentence is true and not true. What has gone wrong? Must we revise our notion of truth and our logic? Or can we dispel the common conviction that there are such self-referential sentences? The present study explores the second path. After comparing the Liar reasoning in formal and informal logic and showing that there are no Gödelian Liar sentences, the study moves on from the semantics of self-reference to the metaphysics of expressions and proposes a novel solution to the Liar paradox: Meaningful expressions are distinct from their syntactic bases and exist only relative to contexts. Detailed semantico-metaphysical arguments show that in this dynamic setting, an object can be referred to only after it has started to exist. Hence the circular reference needed in the Liar paradox cannot occur, after all. As this solution is contextualist, it evades the expressibility problems of other proposals.
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G.W. Leibniz’s legacy to philosophy is extraordinary for his vast body of work, for his originality and prescience, and for his influence. The aim of this volume is to provide a state-of-the-art exploration of Leibniz’s philosophy and its legacy, especially in the period up to Kant.
The essays collected here offer new insights into signature elements of Leibniz’s thought – the theory of contingency, anti-materialism, the principle of sufficient reason, the metaphysics of substance, and his philosophy of mind – as well as the influence of predecessors such as Lull, Descartes, and Malebranche, the reckoning of his ideas in the works of Wolff and Kant, and the contributions of Clarke, Baumgarten, Meier, Du Châtelet, and others to the content, transmission, and reception of Leibnizian philosophy.
The essays collected here offer new insights into signature elements of Leibniz’s thought – the theory of contingency, anti-materialism, the principle of sufficient reason, the metaphysics of substance, and his philosophy of mind – as well as the influence of predecessors such as Lull, Descartes, and Malebranche, the reckoning of his ideas in the works of Wolff and Kant, and the contributions of Clarke, Baumgarten, Meier, Du Châtelet, and others to the content, transmission, and reception of Leibnizian philosophy.
Free Logic is an important field of philosophical logic. It appeared first in the 1950s, and Karel Lambert was one of its founders and coined the term. The volume begins with three of Lambert’s most recent essays. These papers are followed by a dialogue between Karel Lambert and Edgar Morscher on free logic. The second part of the volume contains papers by Peter Simons and Edgar Morscher on free logic. A systematic and historical survey of free logic with an annotated bibliography of works on free logic completes the book.
THE CONTRIBUTORS / DIE AUTOREN Nicholas R. Baima Nathan Bauer Thomas C. Brickhouse Travis Butler Stefan Büttner Moritz Cordes Tsarina Doyle Terence Irwin Péter Lautner Nathan Rothschild Petter Sandstad Nicholas D. Smith Katja Maria Vogt Michael Wreen
Foundations and Challenges
Coercion in the treatment of persons suffering from mental disorders is one of the major ethical controversies in psychiatry. Despite great efforts to reduce the use of coercive interventions, they are still widespread and differ among European countries with regard to the specific type of intervention and the number of affected patients. It is common to justify measures against the present will of patients under the assumption that they promote their well-being, that is, by reference to the ethical principal of beneficence. However, it is indisputable that such measures can also cause severe harm to the patients concerned and that they are often experienced as degrading. So in which situations can coercive interventions justifiably be labeled as »beneficial« at all? How can they be reduced to a minimum? This volume addresses these issues from an interdisciplinary and international perspective, combining contributions of amongst others medical ethicists, philosophers, legal scholars, psychologists, psychiatrists from different European countries. Theoretical and conceptual essays are complemented by contributions with a strong relation to clinical practice.
We are glad to present the nineteenth volume of this journal. Its unitary thematic focus concerns a fruitful discussion of a variety of approaches in Ancient Epistemology. This volume of Logical Analysis and History of Philosophy presents in total eleven articles on the theme of Ancient Epistemology, ranging from the presocratic philosopher Xenophanes to Plotinus and Sextus Empiricus, both by established colleagues and by younger scholars at the beginning of their career. Many interpretations are new or feature new ideas or new applications of ideas. We are confident that they will stimulate the readers to develop their understanding of ancient epistemology in response to them. The Authors: Matthew Duncombe, Alexander P. D. Mourelatos, Patricia Curd, Lucas Angioni, Ada Bronowski, Lee Franklin, Audrey Anton, David Bronstein, Anna Tigani, Andrew Payne, Eleni Perdikouri, Petter Sandstad, Jared Smith and Ádám Tamás Tuboly.
Philosophical Essays in Honour of Wolfgang Spohn
Wolfgang Spohn is an eminent figure in contemporary analytic philosophy. Though best known for his seminal work in formal epistemology, in particular for the inception and development of ranking theory, his philosophical interests are much broader, covering virtually all parts of theoretical philosophy. This collection of essays from colleagues, friends and former students reflects the wide variety of Spohn’s philosophical interests. It contains articles on epistemology (e.g., the nature of knowledge and belief, ranking theory, formal theories of belief and its revision), theory of science (e.g., causality, induction, laws of nature), philosophy of language (e.g., theories of meaning, the semantics of counterfactuals) and philosophy of mind (e.g., intentionality, intuitions, free will) as well as on logic, ontology and game theory. The authors: Ansgar Beckermann, Wolfgang Benkewitz, Bernd Buldt, Ralf Busse, Christoph Fehige, Wolfgang Freitag, Gordian Haas, Volker Halbach, Franz Huber, Andreas Kemmerling, Manfred Kupffer, Hannes Leitgeb, Godehard Link, Arthur Merin, Thomas Müller, Julian Nida-Rümelin, Martine Nida-Rümelin, Hans Rott, Holger Sturm, Thomas Ede Zimmermann and Alexandra Zinke.
Practical reasoning answers the question »what should I do?« As reasoning it must be a valid combination of premises, as practical it must result in action. We can thus ask what form the premises must have and how they must be combined so as to be valid and practical, i.e. so as to result in rational action. The conventional approach to answering this question results in a dilemma. This book develops an alternative approach which resolves this dilemma. The key to this is to start by analysing the requirements that practical reasoning must meet in order to result in action. With these requirements, we can show that the form of the elements of practical reasoning is that of ends. The validity of practical reasoning will be shown to consist in necessary agreement among ends. The concept of ends and the validity of practical reasoning will be developed on the Basis of a critical assessment of rational choice theory. The resulting contrast is that between fully determined objects of preferences and general ends, between comparison and agreement.
Knowledge of Meaning and the Rational-Intentional Explanation of Linguistic Communication
What is it to understand a sentence of a language? This question lies at the very heart of philosophy of language due to its intimate connections with two other issues: the nature of linguistic meaning and the workings of linguistic communication. This book presents a systematic attempt to explicate the concept of sentence understanding, guided by two questions: What exactly is the role played by states of sentence understanding in enabling linguistic communication? And what do such states have to be in order to play that role? Adopting a broadly Gricean picture of communication as background, the book reviews some main proposals from the literature and then develops an original line of Argument for a non-standard version of the view that understanding a sentence consists in possessing propositional knowledge of its meaning. A key to a satisfactory account of this sort, it is argued, lies in a particular view of the nature of propositional attitude states. Apart from dealing successfully with a number of challenges, the resulting account also forms part of an attractive general picture of how philosophers of language may go about explaining our use and interpretation of language.