The Paris Climate Agreement is an important step for international climate policy, but the compensation for negative effects of climate change based on clear assignment of responsibilities remains highly debated. From both a policy and a science perspective, it is unclear how responsibilities should be defined and on what evidence base. We explore different normative principles of justice relevant to climate change impacts, and ask how different forms of causal evidence of impacts drawn from detection and attribution research could inform (...) policy approaches in accordance with justice considerations. We reveal a procedural injustice based on the imbalance of observations and knowledge of impacts between developed and developing countries. This type of injustice needs to be considered in policy negotiations and decisions, and efforts strengthened to reduce it. (shrink)

Rational agents are supposed to maximize expected utility. But what are the options from which they choose? I outline some constraints on an adequate representation of an agent’s options. The options should, for example, contain no information of which the agent is unsure. But they should be sufficiently rich to distinguish all available acts from one another. These demands often come into conflict, so that there seems to be no adequate representation of the options at all. After reviewing existing proposals (...) for how to construe decision-theoretic options and finding them all wanting, I suggest that our model of rational agents should include a special domain of ‘virtual’ option propositions to serve as formal objects of deliberation and choice. (shrink)

Traditional logic as a part of philosophy is one of the oldest scientific disciplines. Mathematical logic, however, is a relatively young discipline and arose from the endeavors of Peano, Frege, Russell and others to create a logistic foundation for mathematics. It steadily developed during the 20th century into a broad discipline with several sub-areas and numerous applications in mathematics, informatics, linguistics and philosophy. While there are already several well-known textbooks on mathematical logic, this book is unique in that it is (...) much more concise than most others, and the material is treated in a streamlined fashion which allows the professor to cover many important topics in a one semester course. Although the book is intended for use as a graduate text, the first three chapters could be understood by undergraduates interested in mathematical logic. These initial chapters cover just the material for an introductory course on mathematical logic combined with the necessary material from set theory. This material is of a descriptive nature, providing a view towards decision problems, automated theorem proving, non-standard models and other subjects. The remaining chapters contain material on logic programming for computer scientists, model theory, recursion theory, Godel’s Incompleteness Theorems, and applications of mathematical logic. Philosophical and foundational problems of mathematics are discussed throughout the text. The author has provided exercises for each chapter, as well as hints to selected exercises. About the German edition: …The book can be useful to the student and lecturer who prepares a mathematical logic course at the university. What a pity that the book is not written in a universal scientific language which mankind has not yet created. - A.Nabebin, Zentralblatt. (shrink)

Modal accounts of knowledge, mind, and language, as prominently defended by Lewis, leave no room for enquiry into non-contingent matters. According to Lewis, there is only one necessarily true proposition, and it is vacuously known by everyone. What, then, are we doing when we do metaphysics, which often seems to deal with non-contingent questions? Lewis never gave a satisfactory answer, or even acknowledged the problem. I explore some options. Can we understand the relevant parts of metaphysics as dealing with contingent (...) questions about our concepts? Can we understand them in terms of a hyperintensional conception of “explicit” knowledge? Both options have some promise. Ultimately, however, I don’t think they succeed at squaring Lewis’s empiricist epistemology with his metaphysical realism. (shrink)

1992 haben die Verfasser eine Reihe von Gesprächen geführt, um die Entdeckung einer doppeltgerichteten Zeit, die Wolfgang Kaempfer in Zusammenarbeit mit Friedrich Cramer zu einem plausiblen Modell entwickelt hat, auf Reichweite und Konsequenz hin zu prüfen. Die nun sorgfältig ausgearbeiteten acht Gespräche, in denen Dietmar Kamper aus seiner Erfahrung der Zeit als 'paradoxer Wiederholung' die Fragen stellt und Wolfgang Kaempfer seine Antworten mit spekulativer Kraft immer aufs Neue vorantreibt, zeigen ein weites Spektrum von möglichen Fällen der Anwendung des (...) Modells; hauptsächlich in den historischen Wissenschaften, aber auch in der Ästhetik, der Philosophie und der Religion! Sie zeigen aber auch, daß die Gesprächsform einer solchen Entdeckung, die über das Modell hinaus weiterentwickelt werden soll, eher entspricht als die Abhandlung. Es geht nämlich nicht um gerichtetes Wissen, sondern um eine intensive Weise des experimentellen Fragens und Antwortens, die in der momentanen Verwirrung der Kriterien auf eine neue Orientierung abhebt. (shrink)

Organizations have neither a right to the vote nor a weighty right to life. We need not enfranchise Goldman Sachs. We should feel few scruples in dissolving Standard Oil. But they are not without rights altogether. We can owe it to them to keep our promises. We can owe them debts of gratitude. Thus, we can owe some things to organizations. But we cannot owe them everything we can owe to people. They seem to have a peculiar, fragmented moral status. (...) What explains this? Individualistic views explain this in terms of individualistic notions alone. Such notions don’t invoke any distinctive features of organizations. They just invoke the features of individual members of organizations. Collectivistic views, instead, explain this in terms of collective notions alone. Such notions don’t invoke the features of individual members of organizations. They just invoke the features of those organizations. We argue that neither approach works. Instead, one needs to synthesize the two approaches. Some individual interests, we think, are distinctively collective. We, as individuals, have a distinctive interest in playing a part in successful collective action. From this, so we argue, flows the apparently peculiar, fragmented moral status of organizations. (shrink)

Der eigentümliche Ausdruck, der heute meist für Welt steht, der Ausdruck Umwelt, scheint ein Welt-Verhältnis auszudrücken, das den Akzent nicht aufs Objekt, sondern aufs Subjekt verlegt hat, auf die den Weltmittelpunkt einnehmende Monade. Diese scheint die Welt nicht mehr als gegebene, sondern als Ensemble von Varietäten zu verstehen, auf die sie zugreifen kann, dem Flaneur auf den Supermärkten dieser Welt vergleichbar. Der Form nach hält sie an einem Eigentumsbegriff fest, der als substantiell, als statisch auslegt, was in Wirklichkeit dynamisch ist (...) in einer Welt, die seit Generationen keinerlei festes Eigentum mehr gelten lassen konnte. Es ist der permanente Zugriff, der verrät, daß er dem in Wahrheit Rechnung trägt. Das >Eigentum sieht sich auf den permanenten Gestus der Aneignung angewiesen. Ein perverseres System ist geschichtlich wahrscheinlich niemals beobachtet worden. Nicht das viel gescholtene Konkurrenzprinzip, ein weit virulenteres Movens treibt es an. Denn das Aneignungsprinzip. (shrink)

Die Frage, wie ein Anfang im Denken zu machen sei, oder wie der Anfang von Denken zu denken sei, war Gegenstand der philosophischen Reflexion des Klassischen Deutschen Idealismus. Die Autoren dieses Bandes thematisieren nun für philosophische Konzepte aus der Zeit vor und nach dem Klassischen Idealismus, wie in ihnen das Problem des Anfangs gedacht wird. Betrachtete Autoren sind: Marsilius Ficino, Johannes Scotus Eriugena, Giordano Bruno, Christoph Scheibler, Husserl, Meister Eckhard, Nishida und Davidson.

Es existieren unterschiedlichste Antworten auf die Frage, ob Tieren bzw. allgemein nichtmenschlichen Lebewesen ein inhärenter moralischer Wert zukommt. Dieses Buch gelangt auf transzendentalphilosophischem Wege zu der Antwort, daß allen Lebewesen ein solcher Wert zukommt. Hieraus erwächst die eigentliche ethische Herausforderung, da der Mensch notwendig andere Lebewesen nutzen muß, um überleben zu können. Die Lösung des hiermit bezeichneten Dilemmas, so wird gezeigt, erwächst aus der Unterscheidung von das Gute und ein Gut.

This book is about the interrelationship between nature, semiosis, metarepresentation and (self-)consciousness, and the role played by metarepresentation in ...

Wolfgang Welsch examines global aestheticization phenomena, probes the relationship of aesthetics and ethics, and considers the broad relevance of aesthetics for contemporary thinking. He argues that modes of thought familiar from the aesthetic realm comprise fundamental paradigms for understanding todayÆs reality. The implications for specific and everyday issues are demonstrated in studies of architecture, advertising, the Internet, and our perception of the life world. Surgically precise, innovative, and, above all, relevant, this book is an essential resource, providing the analysis (...) of contemporary culture with philosophical bite. Aesthetics is to transcend itself, address the whole realm of aethesis, and hence enable orientation in the contemporary condition. Undoing aesthetics means releasing it from old cultural binds and giving it new ties with the future. (shrink)

How ought you to evaluate your options if you’re uncertain about which axiology is true? One prominent response is Expected Moral Value Maximisation, the view that under axiological uncertainty, an option is better than another if and only if it has the greater expected moral value across axiologies. EMVM raises two fundamental questions. First, there’s a question about what it should even mean. In particular, it presupposes that we can compare moral value across axiologies. So to even understand EMVM, we (...) need to explain what it is for such comparisons to hold. Second, assuming that we understand it, there’s a question about whether EMVM is true. Since there are many plausible rivals, we need an argument to defend it. In this paper, I’ll introduce a representation theorem for axiological uncertainty to answer these two questions. Roughly, the theorem shows that if all our axiologies satisfy the von Neumann–Morgenstern axioms, and if the facts about which options are better than which in light of your uncertainty also satisfy these axioms as well as a Pareto condition, then these facts have a relevantly unique expected utility representation. If I’m right, this theorem at once affords us a compelling way to understand EMVM—and specifically intertheoretic comparisons—and a systematic argument for its truth. (shrink)

Magnetism in meta-semantics is the view that the meaning of our words is determined in part by their use and in part by the objective naturalness of candidate meanings. This hypothesis is commonly attributed to David Lewis, and has been put to philosophical work by Brian Weatherson, Ted Sider and others. I argue that there is no evidence that Lewis ever endorsed the view, and that his actual account of language reveals good reasons against it.

Einflussreiche Denkerin des 20. Jahrhunderts. Das Handbuch erklärt die philosophischen, politischen und literarischen Kontexte, die Hannah Arendts Denken geprägt haben. Es präsentiert neben Informationen zur Biografie und den zeitgenössischen Bezügen alle wichtigen Werke und gibt Hinweise zu deren internationaler Rezeption in vielen Disziplinen. Zentrale Begriffe und Konzepte im Gesamtwerk Hannah Arendts werden ausführlich erklärt darunter: Antisemitismus, Das Böse, Macht, Revolution, Republik/Nation, Totalitarismus u. v. a.

This succinct introduction to modern theories of literature and the arts demonstrates how each theory is built and what it can accomplish. Represents a wide variety of theories, including phenomenological theory, hermeneutical theory, gestalt theory, reception theory, semiotic theory, Marxist theory, deconstruction, anthropological theory, and feminist theory. Uses classic literary texts, such as Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn, Spenser’s The Shephearde’s Calender and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land to illustrate his explanations. Includes key statements by the major proponents (...) of each theory. Presents the different theories objectively, allowing students to decide which if any, they subscribe to. Gives students a sense of the potential of theory. Includes a glossary of technical terms. (shrink)

Während die bisherige Forschung überwiegend auf Rekonstruktion und Analyse des philosophischen und pädagogischen Werkes von Theodor Litt bezogen war, konzentrieren sich gegenwärtige Untersuchungen bedingt durch die Zunahme von ...

The normative mechanics of promising seem complex. The strength and content of promissory obligations, and the residual duties they entail upon being violated, have various prima facie surprising features. We give an account to explain these features. Promises have a point. The point of a promise to φ is a promise-independent reason to φ for the promisee’s sake. A promise turns this reason into a duty. This explains the mechanics of promises. And it grounds a nuanced picture of immoral promises, (...) an argument against promissory bare wrongings, and a constraint on theories of why we have promissory obligations at all. (shrink)

Our senses provide us with information about the world, but what exactly do they tell us? I argue that in order to optimally respond to sensory stimulations, an agent’s doxastic space may have an extra, “imaginary” dimension of possibility; perceptual experiences confer certainty on propositions in this dimension. To some extent, the resulting picture vindicates the old-fashioned empiricist idea that all empirical knowledge is based on a solid foundation of sense-datum propositions, but it avoids most of the problems traditionally associated (...) with that idea. The proposal might also explain why experiences appear to have a non-physical phenomenal character, even if the world is entirely physical. (shrink)

The identity of indiscernibles states that indiscernible objects must be identical. Many philosophers have held that the PII turns out to be either true but trivial, or non-trivial but false, depending on how the notion of discernibility is spelled out. In this paper, I propose and defend an account of this notion which aims to yield a minimally non-trivial and yet plausible version of the PII. I argue moreover that this version of the principle is immune to a number of (...) well-known and recent objections to the PII. (shrink)

The standard view of ignorance is that it consists in the mere lack of knowledge or true belief. Duncan Pritchard has recently argued, against the standard view, that ignorance is the lack of knowledge/true belief that is due to an improper inquiry. I shall call, Pritchard’s alternative account the Normative Account. The purpose of this article is to strengthen the Normative Account by providing an independent vargument supporting it.

This paper starts out from the idea that semantics is a “special science” whose aim, like that of chemistry or ecology, is to identify systematic, high-level patterns in a fundamentally physical world. I defend an approach to this task on which sentences are associated with with sets of possible worlds (of some kind). These sets of worlds, however, are not postulated for the compositional treatment of intensional contexts; they are not meant to capture what is intuitively asserted or communicated by (...) an utterance; nor are they supposed to shed light on the cognitive processes that underlie out linguistic competence. Instead, their job description is to capture certain regularities in the interactions between subjects using the relevant language. I also raise some questions about how the relevant worlds might be construed. (shrink)

Eine Einfiihrung in die epistemische Logik wurde schon vor unge fahr zwei Jahrzehnten durch Jaakko Hintikka geschrieben, und auf sein "Knowledge and Belief" nimmt das vorliegende Buch nicht nur durch den Titel "Glauben, Wissen und Wahrscheinlichkeit" Bezug. Es diirfte deshalb wohl angebracht sein, wenn der Autor eines Buches, das so deutlich die Nachfolgeschaft eines anderen beansprucht, sich dafiir rechtfertigt und erklart, worin sich sein Werk von dem des Vorgangers unterscheidet. Ein wichtiger Punkt, in dem die zweite iiber die erste Einleitung (...) in die epistemische Logik hinausgeht, wird schon durch die Titel erganzung "... und Wahrscheinlichkeit" signalisiert. Wahrend Hin tikkas erkenntnistheoretische Untersuchungen sich fast ausschlieB lich auf die Bestimmung einer Wissenslogik ("episteme") konzen trierten, werden hier unter Bezugnahme auf die Theorie subjektiver Wahrscheinlichkeit zusatzlich diverse Glaubenslogiken ("doxa") ent wickelt. Insbesondere wird ein Begriff "schwachen" Glaubens im Sinne des Fiir-wahrscheinlich-Haltens vom "starken" Glaubensbe griff im Sinne festester Oberzeugungen abgegrenzt, eine Unterschei dung, die im angelsachsischen Sprachraum bei der Diskussion der Logik von "belief" straflich vernachlassigt wurde. Die genaue Aus arbeitung dieses Unterschieds, die exakte semantische Charakteri sierung der entsprechenden doxastischen Modaloperatoren, und die Suche nach vollstandigen Axiomatisierungen korrespondierender Logiken fiihrte dabei in (mathematisches) Neuland: zur Theorie klassifikatorischer Wahrscheinlichkeit. Diese erste wesentliche Wei terentwicklung von "Knowledge and Belief" konnte man durch die Formel beschreiben: von rein epistemischer Logik hin zu epistemi scher und doxastischer Logik. (shrink)

This is the basis of the first part of the book.

There is a tacit assumption that interpretation comes naturally, that human beings live by constantly interpreting. In this sense, we might even rephrase Descartes by saying: We interpret, therefore we are. While such a basic human disposition makes interpretation appear to come naturally, the forms it takes, however, do not. In this work, Iser offers a fresh approach by formulating an "anatomy of interpretation" through which we can understand the act of interpretation in its many different manifestations. For Iser, there (...) are several different genres of interpretation, all of which are acts of translation designed to transpose something into something else. Perhaps the most obvious example of interpretation involves canonical texts, such as the Rabbinical exegesis of the Torah or Samuel Johnson's reading of Shakespeare. But what happens when the matter that one seeks to interpret consists not of a text but of a welter of fragments, as in the study of history, or when something is hidden, as in the practice of psychoanalysis, or is as complex as a culture or system? Iser details how, in each of these cases, the space that is opened up by interpretation is negotiated in a different way, thus concluding that interpretation always depends on what it seeks to translate. For students of philosophy, literary and critical theory, anthropology, and cultural history, Iser's elucidation of the mechanics by which we translate and understand, as well as his assessment of the anthropological roots of our drive to make meaning, will undoubtedly serve as a revelation. (shrink)