Name der Zeitschrift: Kant-Studien Jahrgang: 106 Heft: 2 Seiten: 362-367.

A philosopher argues that state-sponsored cyberattacks against central military or civilian targets are always acts of war. What is this philosopher doing? According to conceptual analysts, the philosopher is making a claim about our concept of war. According to philosophical realists, the philosopher is making a claim about war per se. In a quickly developing literature, a third option is being explored: the philosopher is engineering the concept of war. On this view, the philosopher is making a proposal about which (...) concept we should have – even if it deviates from the extant concept, and even if it does not capture ‘what war really is’. The activity or method of proposing such revisionary definitions, as well as the metaphilosophical reflection on it, has become known as conceptual engineering. (shrink)

Conceptual engineers aim to revise rather than describe our concepts. But what are concepts? And how does one engineer them? Answering these questions is of central importance for implementing and theorizing about conceptual engineering. This paper discusses and criticizes two influential views of this issue: semanticism, according to which conceptual engineers aim to change linguistic meanings, and psychologism, according to which conceptual engineers aim to change psychological structures. I argue that neither of these accounts can give us the full story. (...) Instead, I propose and defend the Dual Content View of Conceptual Engineering. On this view, conceptual engineering targets concepts, where concepts are understood as having two kinds of contents: referential content and cognitive content. I show that this view is independently plausible and that it gives us a comprehensive account of conceptual engineering that helps to make progress on some of the most difficult problems surrounding conceptual engineering. (shrink)

This article takes stock of the basic notions of Information Structure (IS). It first provides a general characterization of IS following Chafe (1976) within a communicative model of Common Ground (CG), which distinguishes between CG content and CG management. IS is concerned with those features of language that concern the local CG. It then defines and discusses the notions of Focus (as indicating alternatives) and its various uses, Givenness (as indicating that a denotation is already present in the CG), and (...) Topic (as specifying what an statement is about). It also proposes a new notion, Delimitation, which comprises contrastive topics and frame setters, and indicates that the current conversational move does not satisfy the local communicative needs totally. It also points out that the rhetorical structuring partly belongs to IS. (shrink)

The studies in this 1996 volume consider Hegel's mature views on ethics and politics and relate them to the classical tradition of Western political thought. Manfred Tiedel brings to the analysis of Hegel's views a high level of scholarship and a thorough knowledge of earlier thinkers. Concentrating on the Philosophy of Right, he reveals connections which clarify Hegel's understanding of his relationship with his predecessors and of the transformation of political philosophy which Hegel wanted to effect. In doing so, (...) he throws much needed light on the structure of Hegel's work and on many of its more obscure doctrines concerning natural law, political economy, civil society and the state. Professor Riedel's work is highly regarded in Germany. The translation of these essays will provide a valuable counterpart to the approach of most English-speaking scholars and will help significantly to extend the understanding and appreciation of Hegel's political philosophy. (shrink)

Governments standardly deploy a distinction between goods and services in assessing economic health and tracking national income statistics, of which medical goods and services carry significant importance. In what follows we draw on Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) to introduce a third kind of entity called patterns, which help capture the various ways in which goods and services are intertwined and help also to show how many services generate a new kind of non-goods-related products. Patterns are an overlooked yet essential features (...) of many economic sectors including medicine. Studying patterns offers new insights into various components of economic analysis, including outcomes-oriented evaluations of medical services and the value of human capital in the medical sphere. (shrink)

Als »Subjektphilosophie« hat man das neuzeitliche Denken insgesamt charakterisiert. Diese Auszeichnung verdankt das Subjekt der verwegenen Hoffnung, es eigne sich zum ultimativen Prinzip der Wissensbegründung. Das Interesse an einer Aufklärung seiner Struktur wurde dadurch jedoch in den Hintergrund gedrängt. Diese Struktur steht im Zentrum von Manfred Franks jüngstem Buch, das einen Blick auf die moderne Geschichte der Subjekttheorien mit Analysen der inneren Beschaffenheit und der Zeitlichkeit des Subjekts sowie seines Verhältnisses zur Intersubjektivität und einer Auseinandersetzung mit klassischen und neuesten (...) analytischen Theoriebildungen verbindet. Dem Begriff der Präreflexivität kommt dabei die Schlüsselrolle zu. (shrink)

This book presents a vivid argument for the almost lost idea of a unity of all natural sciences. It starts with the "strange" physics of matter, including particle physics, atomic and quantum mechanics, cosmology, relativity and their consequences (Chapter 1), and it continues by describing the properties of material systems that are best understood by statistical and phase-space concepts (Chapter 2). These lead to entropy and to the classical picture of quantitative information, initially devoid of value and meaning (Chapter 3). (...) Finally, "information space" and dynamics within it are introduced as a basis for semantics (Chapter 4), leading to an exploration of life and thought as new problems in physics (Chapter 5). Dynamic equations - again of a strange (but very general) nature - bring about the complex familiarity of the world we live in. Surprising new results in the life sciences open our eyes to the richness of physical thought, and they show us what can and what cannot be explained by a Darwinian approach. The abstract physical approach is applicable to the origins of life, of meaningful information and even of our universe. [T]itle presents a vivid argument for a unity of all natural sciences. This unity engenders the 'complex familiarity' of the world in which we live and which can be described in 'strangely simple' theoretical terms, leading to new insights into the mysterious phenomenon of life. (shrink)

Maine de Biran’s concept of the embodied mind is most suitable to alert our consciousness today, while people are being exceedingly exposed to and submerged by comforting invasive virtual realities of metaverses that essentially minimize their _resistance_-potential to generate _will_ and _effort_.

Originally presented as the author's thesis (doctoral)--Freie Universitèat Berlin.

In this paper, we first briefly survey the main responses to the challenge that experimental philosophy poses to the method of cases, given the common assumption that the latter is crucially based on intuitive judgments about cases. Second, we discuss two of the most popular responses in more detail: the expertise defense and the mischaracterization objection. Our take on the expertise defense is that the available empirical data do not support the claim that professional philosophers enjoy relevant expertise in their (...) intuitive judgments about cases. In contrast, the mischaracterization objection seems considerably more promising than its largely negative reception has suggested. We argue that the burden of proof is thus on philosophers who still hold that the method of cases crucially relies on intuitive judgments about cases. Finally, we discuss whether conceptual engineering provides an alternative to the method of cases in light of the challenge from experimental philosophy. We argue that this is not clearly the case, because conceptual engineering also requires descriptive information about the concepts it aims to improve. However, its primarily normative perspective on our concepts makes it largely orthogonal to the challenge from experimental philosophy, and it can also benefit from the empirical methods of the latter. (shrink)

Using game theory and examples of actual games people play, Nobel laureate Manfred Eigen and Ruthild Winkler show how the elements of chance and rules underlie ...

Carl Henrik Koch har i denne bog samlet en række af sine artikler om fremtrædende danske filosoffer. Med start ved Holberg i 1700-tallet arbejder Koch sig op gennem den danske filosofihistorie og strejfer blandt andre Eilchov, Sibbern, A.P. Adler, Brøchner og naturligvis mastodonterne Søren Kierkegaard og Georg Brandes. Bogen giver en hurtig, men spændende indførsel i en vigtig del af den danske kulturhistorie, som gennem de sidste 250 år har haft stor indflydelse både herhjemme og i udlandet.

What exactly do we need to do in order to make a promise, or to exercise some other normative power? On a view relied on by many philosophers writing on promising, consent, and related phenomena, the answer is that we must communicate a suitable kind of intention. On this view, power-conferring principles assert that specific normative consequences, determined in part by the content of the communicated intention, attach to such communicative acts, and these principles need not be socially practised or (...) accepted to be true. The paper offers a defense of this convention-independent view against the forceful challenge developed by Jed Lewinsohn in ‘The “Natural Unintelligibility” of Normative Powers’. Lewinsohn appeals to action-theoretic considerations to show that the relevant type of communicative act could not be performed under conditions of rationality and full information, and that therefore promissory power and other normative powers require the existence of social rules conferring such powers. The defense of the view targeted by Lewinsohn turns partly on the exact content of plausible constraints on the intelligibility of actions done with a particular aim, and partly on the question just how the social acceptance of power-conferring rules should be thought to matter. (shrink)

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We present new axiomatic characterizations of the proportional Shapley value, a weighted TU-value with the worths of the singletons as weights. The presented characterizations are proportional counterparts to the famous characterizations of the Shapley value by Shapley and Young. We introduce two new axioms, called proportionality and player splitting, respectively. Each of them makes a main difference between the proportional Shapley value and the Shapley value. If the stand-alone worths are plausible weights, the proportional Shapley value is a convincing alternative (...) to the Shapley value, for example in cost allocation. Especially, the player splitting property, which states that players’ payoffs do not change if another player splits into two new players who have the same impact to the game as the original player, justifies the use of the proportional Shapley value in many economic situations. (shrink)

(2012). Reasoning without believing: on the mechanisation of presuppositions and partiality. Journal of Applied Non-Classical Logics: Vol. 22, No. 4, pp. 295-317. doi: 10.1080/11663081.2012.705962.

This paper discusses the logical space of alternative conceptual engineering projects, with a specific focus on (1) the processes, (2) the targets and goals, and (3) the methods of such projects. We present an overview of how these three aspects interact in the contemporary literature and discuss those alternative projects that have yet to be explored based on our suggested typology. We show how choices about each element in a conceptual engineering project constrain the possibilities for the others, thereby giving (...) rise to distinct groupings of possible projects under the banner of conceptual engineering. We conclude with a critical reflection on the potential ethical issues that arise as a result of effectively putting conceptual engineering into practice. (shrink)