This volume documents the 17th Münster Lectures in Philosophy with Susan Haack, the prominent contemporary philosopher. It contains an original, programmatic article by Haack on her overall philosophical approach, entitled ‘The Fragmentation of Philosophy, the Road to Reintegration’. In addition, the volume includes seven papers on various aspects of Haack’s philosophical work as well as her replies to the papers. Susan Haack has deeply influenced many of the debates in contemporary philosophy. In her vivid and accessible way, she has made (...) ground-breaking contributions covering a wide range of topics, from logic, metaphysics and epistemology, to pragmatism and the philosophy of science and law. In her work, Haack has always been very sensitive in detecting subtle differences. The distinctions she has introduced reveal what lies at the core of philosophical controversies, and show the problems that exist with established views. In order to resolve these problems, Haack has developed some ‘middle-course approaches’. One example of this is her famous ‘Foundherentism’, a theory of justification that includes elements from both the rival theories of Foundationalism and Coherentism. Haack herself has offered the best description of her work calling herself a ‘passionate moderate’. (shrink)

This paper focuses on Ernst Mach’s theory of scientific experimentation. As I shall show, Mach presents an extraordinarily wide perspective on scientific experiments, bringing together heuristic, evolutionary, historical and didactical aspects. For Mach, experimentation is not reduced to controlled testing in a laboratory. It rather describes a quite general human, and even animal, activity to explore the world. By relying on such a broad notion of experiment, however, his theory has to deal with a wide range of objections. I shall (...) analyse these objections by confronting Mach’s theory with Franz Brentano’s straightforward criticism. I shall conclude that Mach’s theory entails some unsolvable inconsistencies. These inconsistencies lead to some important questions that still pose challenges to the philosophy of scientific experimentation. (shrink)

Is there a fundamental difference between practical and theoretical knowledge? The thesis, going back to Gilbert Ryle, that "knowing-how" is an independent form of knowledge manifesting itself in practical abilities that cannot be reduced to "knowing-that" (propositional knowledge) is a heated topic of debate in contemporary philosophy. This book presents an analysis of practical knowledge understood as an independent form of knowledge with systematic connections to knowledge, thought, and action.

Dieser Aufsatz untersucht einige Zusammenhänge zwischen der Zuschreibung von Intuitionen und intuitivem Wissen einerseits und epistemischen Ungerechtigkeiten andererseits. Der Aufsatz gliedert sich in zwei Teile. Ausgangspunkt ist im ersten Teil Frickers Theorie der epistemischen Ungerechtigkeit. Ich zeige auf, dass dem Verweis auf die „weibliche Intuition“ eine Schlüsselrolle in der Etablierung der Konzepte der testimonialen und hermeneutischen Ungerechtigkeit zukommt, da in ihm systematische Vorurteile über gender-codierte Denkmuster und Verhaltensweisen kulminieren, die paradigmatisch für strukturelle epistemische Ungerechtigkeiten sind. Allerdings gilt es zu betonen, (...) dass der Begriff der Intuition nicht nur im Sinne einer epistemischen Abwertung, sondern auch im Sinne einer Aufwertung höchst problematisch ist. Hierdurch wird eine Schwachstelle in Frickers Theorie deutlich, da diese durch die Annahme einer grundlegenden Asymmetrie zwischen Glaubwürdigkeitsdefiziten und -exzessen ihre Perspektive auf epistemische Ungerechtigkeiten zu weit einschränkt. Im zweiten Teil werde ich anhand zweier ausgewählter metaphilosophischer Debatten einige Verbindungen zwischen dem Intuitionsbegriff in der analytischen Philosophie und Fragen nach epistemischen Ungerechtigkeiten aufdecken. Hierbei werde ich in Bezug auf die Debatte um die sog. Expertise-Verteidigung dafür argumentieren, dass diese nicht auf epistemische Fragestellungen begrenzt werden kann, sondern auch auf eine ethische Dimension verweist. Mit Blick auf die Debatte um die Gender-Lücke in der akademischen Philosophie werde ich aufzeigen dass hier zwar epistemische und ethische Perspektiven zusammengeführt werden, dass bestimmte Argumentationsmuster aber so angelegt sind, dass sie sich implizit an eine problematische, dualistische Vorstellung von Intuition binden. (shrink)

Stanley and Williamson (The Journal of Philosophy 98(8), 411–444 2001 ) reject the fundamental distinction between what Ryle once called ‘knowing-how’ and ‘knowing-that’. They claim that knowledge-how is just a species of knowledge-that, i.e. propositional knowledge, and try to establish their claim relying on the standard semantic analysis of ‘knowing-how’ sentences. We will undermine their strategy by arguing that ‘knowing-how’ phrases are under-determined such that there is not only one semantic analysis and by critically discussing and refuting the positive account (...) of knowing-how they offer. Furthermore, we argue for an extension of the classical ‘knowing-how’/‘knowing-that’-dichotomy by presenting a new threefold framework: Using some core-examples of the recent debate, we will show that we can analyze knowledge situations that are not captured by the Rylean dichotomy and argue that, therefore, the latter has to be displaced by a more fine-grained theory of knowledge-formats. We will distinguish three different formats of knowledge we can have of our actions, namely (1) propositional, (2) practical, and (3) image-like formats of knowledge. Furthermore, we will briefly analyze the underlying representations of each of these knowledge-formats. (shrink)