Online research in philosophy

This paper reconsiders the relation between Kantian transcendental reflection (including transcendental idealism) and 20th century philosophy of science. As has been pointed out by Michael Friedman and others, the notion of a "relativized a priori" played a central role in Rudolf Carnap's, Hans Reichenbach's and other logical empiricists' thought. Thus, even though the logical empiricists dispensed with Kantian synthetic a priori judgments, they did maintain a crucial Kantian doctrine, viz., a distinction between the (transcendental) level of establishing norms for empirical (...) inquiry and the (empirical) level of norm-governed inquiry itself. Even though Thomas Kuhn's theory of scientific revolutions is often taken to be diametrically opposed to the received view of science inherited from logical empiricism, a version of this basically Kantian distinction is preserved in Kuhn's thought. In this respect, as Friedman has argued, Kuhn is closer to Carnap's theory of linguistic frameworks than, say, W.V. Quine's holistic naturalism. Kuhn, indeed, might be described as a "new Kant" in post-empiricist philosophy of science. This article examines, first, the relativization of the Kantian a priori in Reichenbach's work, arguing that while Reichenbach (after having given up his original Kantianism) criticized "transcendentalism", he nevertheless retained, in a reinterpreted form, a Kantian-like transcendental method, claiming that the task of philosophy (of science) is to discover and analyze the presuppositions underlying the applicability of conceptual systems. Then, some reflections on Kuhn's views on realism are offered, and it is suggested that Kuhn (as well as some other influential contributors to the realism debate, such as Hilary Putnam) can be reinterpreted as a (relativized, naturalized) Kantian transcendental idealist. Given the central importance of Kuhnian themes in contemporary philosophy of science, it is no exaggeration to claim that Kantian transcendental inquiry into the constitutive principles of empirical knowledge, and even transcendental idealism (as the framework for such inquiry), still have a crucial role to play in this field and deserve further scrutiny. (shrink)

The paper discusses the relation between chess and philosophy, examining, among other things, how far chess might reveal important features of philosophical problemanalysis and argumentation. There is a plurality of scientific, philosophical, and other perspectives from which chess can be viewed. Some attention must be drawn to these various ways of conceptualizing the game, but the main emphasis of the paper lies in uncovering certain philosophically- and metaphilosophically- relevant basic assumptions of chess. It is argued that the thought patterns and (...) reasoning procedures typical of chess seem to merge into those practised in philosophy. Moreover, we face in the common area of chess and other disciplines a multifarious possibility of research programmes, which promise to turn out useful both for the scientific and aesthetic understanding, and perhaps also for the chess tournament practice. Certain philosophical insights inspired by the practice of chess may lead us to transform our views about various complex human phenomena: not only about the nature of calculatory problem-solving and the relation between human intelligence and artificial intelligence, but also about ethical reasoning and even philosophical argumentation itself. (shrink)

There are philosophers who think that questions of fact can be distinguished from questions of interpretation of facts. Davidson calls the distinction between unconceptualized facts and interpretative schemes "the third dogma of empiricism". This points to Quine's article 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism". In it, Quine challenged the distinction between synthetic and analytic statements and the possibility of reducing the meaning of all synthetic statements to immediateexperience. Whereas Quine has remained faithful to empiricism, Davidson gives up empiricism. It is difficult to (...) determine his standpoint. His remark that our actual scheme is best understood as extensional and materialistic, is rather perplexing. Is it intelligible, under Davidson's premisses, to speak of our actual scheme? (shrink)

Der Begriff 'Sinn' wird im Tractatus in mehrfachem Sinn gebraucht und dem Wertbegriff angenähert. Die Wertprädikate wie 'schön' und 'gut' gehören aber im Tractatus zum Unsinnigen. Während das Sinnvolle in der Beschreibung der Wirklichkeit besteht und das Sinnlose als Grundlage der Deutung der Logik funktioniert, soll das Unsinnige schlechthin unaussag- und undenkbar sein. Dennoch ist es möglich, zwischen zwei Arten des Unsinnigen im Tractatus zu unterscheiden: (1) was gezeigt werden kann, (2) was ohne irgendwelche kognitive Funktion ist. Das mystische Zeigen (...) wird in der späteren Philosophie Wittgensteins entmystifiziert. In ihr kann man auch einer gewissen Differenzierung zwischen der ethischen Charakterisierung und der ästhetischen Charakterisierung der Wirklichkeit nachspüren. (shrink)