Der erste Band dieser Reihe trägt den Titel: _Philosophische Grundlagen der Interkulturalität_. Neben einer begrifflichen und inhaltlichen Klärung der Interkulturalität geht es in den Beiträgen um eine grundsätzliche Diskussion und Standortbestimmung der interkulturellen Philosophie in dem heutigen Weltkontext der Philosophie. Der heutige weltphilosophische Kontext bedarf einer komprehensiveren Hermeneutik.

Angeregt durch Pierre Hadots bahnbrechendes Buch Philosophie als Lebensform ist in den letzten Jahren das griechische und romische Denken als eine Art philosophische Praxis in den Blick gekommen. Philosophie sei nicht nur eine Schule des Denkens, sondern auch eine Schule des Lebens. Philosophie eroffne die Moglichkeit einer Bekehrung des Menschen, die das ganze Leben verandert und das Wesen desjenigen verwandelt, der sie vollzieht. Im Zusammenspiel von vita contemplativa und vita activa vermag ein Mensch eine Lebenseinstellung zu kultivieren, die auch dann (...) tragt, wenn Schicksalsschlage oder Erfahrungen von Leid und Enttauschung ihn die Fluchtigkeit bzw. Abgrundigkeit seiner Existenz erkennen lassen. Dazu bedarf es allerdings einer meditativ-reflexiven Transformation durch geistige Ubungen, wie sie die Schulen der Epikureer, Stoiker und Skeptiker im Sinne einer Therapeia entwickelt haben. Verwandte Ideen und Ansatze finden sich spater bei Philosophen wie David Hume, William James, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein oder Karl Jaspers, aber auch in der chinesischen und in der indischen Tradition lassen sich bei Buddha, im Lotos-Sutra, bei Nagarjuna, Sri Aurobindo oder Zhuangzi Grundgedanken einer therapeutischen Wirkung von Philosophie ausmachen. Ram Adhar Mall und Damian Peikert bringen diese Traditionslinien in einen Dialog, der nicht nur fur die interkulturelle Philosophie eine Bereicherung bedeutet. (shrink)

INTRODUCTORY The twin concepts of "experience" and "reason" are the most deceitful in the long history of philosophy and there are theories based on them which represent extreme forms of empiricism and rationalism. The rationalism is generally contrasted with empiricism and this contrast depends on the opposition btween experience and reason. These problems are as old as the life of philospohy and philosophers have always struggled hard to overcome the traditional opposition between these two concepts...The present work thematizes this age-old (...) problem from anew and hopes to overcome the opposition by a critical but sympathetic exposition, interpretation and analysis of the phenomenology of Husserl. (shrink)

The present work is the product of several years study of the various aspects of Kanfs Critical Philosophy and Hume's naturalism. During that time many individuals have helped with this work and it is hardly possible to set down the names of aH of them. One name does des erve special mention - Prof. Dr. H. Heimsoeth with whom the author has discussed some of the very knotty problems of Kantian Philosophy. Although Hume has been - as Kant freely admits (...) in the Preface to his "Prolegomena" - one of the most decisive influences and turning points in the philosophical development of Kant, the author does not thematize in this work the age-old problem of whether Kant reaHy read, understood and refuted Hume. That it has been, ever since Hume wrote, a favorite pursuit among philosophers to answer hirn, to refute hirn, and to refute Kanfs attempt at refutation of hirn, irrespective of its being convincing or not, must be mentioned with special respect. (shrink)

Mai headings: I. Logik, Methodologie und Hermeneutik der Interkulturalitaet.- II. Erkennen und Handeln: gibt es eine Differenz der Geschlechter'.- III. Philosophie und interkulturelle Bildung. Frisian (R. Nigel Smith).

Atheism is an ideology that rejects the existence of God and has gained increasing prominence in societies globally, including Malaysia. Atheism significantly challenges the religious orientation of Malaysian society. Specifically, atheism challenges spiritual and ethical foundations, unity, and cultural heritage linked to religious beliefs. Understanding these challenges is vital to formulate proactive measures, education, and informed dialogue to mitigate the negative impact of atheism on Malaysian society. This study explored the effects of atheism on Malaysian religious society via library research (...) analysis. Scholarly articles, books, and reputable online resources on religious and atheism underwent content analysis, which yielded five key findings. Firstly, atheism leads to the loss of spiritual guidance and morality. Secondly, atheism potentially erodes ethical values and societal norms, and subsequently reduces social trust and cohesion. Thirdly, atheism contributes to moral relativism and ethical ambiguity, which potentially undermines established moral frameworks and social norms. Fourthly, atheism can weaken community cohesion. Lastly, atheism threatens religious institutions and practices. Additionally, the absence of the role of God might undermine the cultural and heritage importance of religion. This study presented critical insights on the negative societal effects of atheism. By exploring the potential consequences of atheism on social cohesion, moral foundations, and existential perspectives, this study highlighted the need for religious education as part of atheism prevention and rehabilitation. (shrink)

This volume features the complete text of all regular papers, posters, and summaries of symposia presented at the 16th annual meeting of the Cognitive Science ...

A long series of studies in social psychology have shown that the explanations people give for their own behaviors are fundamentally different from the explanations they give for the behaviors of others. Still, a great deal of uncertainty remains about precisely what sorts of differences one finds here. We offer a new approach to addressing the problem. Specifically, we distinguish between two levels of representation ─ the level of linguistic structure (which consists of the actual series of words used in (...) the explanation) and the level of conceptual structure (which consists of the concepts these words are used to express). We then formulate and test hypotheses both about self-other differences in conceptual structure and about self-other differences in the mapping from conceptual structure to linguistic structure. (shrink)

In the last decade, reading research has seen a paradigmatic shift. A new wave of computational models of orthographic processing that offer various forms of noisy position or context-sensitive coding have revolutionized the field of visual word recognition. The influx of such models stems mainly from consistent findings, coming mostly from European languages, regarding an apparent insensitivity of skilled readers to letter order. Underlying the current revolution is the theoretical assumption that the insensitivity of readers to letter order reflects the (...) special way in which the human brain encodes the position of letters in printed words. The present article discusses the theoretical shortcomings and misconceptions of this approach to visual word recognition. A systematic review of data obtained from a variety of languages demonstrates that letter-order insensitivity is neither a general property of the cognitive system nor a property of the brain in encoding letters. Rather, it is a variant and idiosyncratic characteristic of some languages, mostly European, reflecting a strategy of optimizing encoding resources, given the specific structure of words. Since the main goal of reading research is to develop theories that describe the fundamental and invariant phenomena of reading across orthographies, an alternative approach to model visual word recognition is offered. The dimensions of a possible universal model of reading, which outlines the common cognitive operations involved in orthographic processing in all writing systems, are discussed. (shrink)

The human ability to represent, conceptualize, and reason about mind and behavior is one of the greatest achievements of human evolution and is made possible by a “folk theory of mind” — a sophisticated conceptual framework that relates different mental states to each other and connects them to behavior. This chapter examines the nature and elements of this framework and its central functions for social cognition. As a conceptual framework, the folk theory of mind operates prior to any particular conscious (...) or unconscious cognition and provides the “framing” or interpretation of that cognition. Central to this framing is the concept of intentionality, which distinguishes intentional action (caused by the agent’s intention and decision) from unintentional behavior (caused by internal or external events without the intervention of the agent’s decision). A second important distinction separates publicly observable from publicly unobservable (i.e., mental) events. Together, the two distinctions define the kinds of events in social interaction that people attend to, wonder about, and try to explain. A special focus of this chapter is the powerful tool of behavior explanation, which relies on the folk theory of mind but is also intimately tied to social demands and to the perceiver’s social goals. A full understanding of social cognition must consider the folk theory of mind as the conceptual underpinning of all (conscious and unconscious) perception and thinking about the social world. (shrink)

I have argued that orthographic processing cannot be understood and modeled without considering the manner in which orthographic structure represents phonological, semantic, and morphological information in a given writing system. A reading theory, therefore, must be a theory of the interaction of the reader with his/her linguistic environment. This outlines a novel approach to studying and modeling visual word recognition, an approach that focuses on the common cognitive principles involved in processing printed words across different writing systems. These claims were (...) challenged by several commentaries that contested the merits of my general theoretical agenda, the relevance of the evolution of writing systems, and the plausibility of finding commonalities in reading across orthographies. Other commentaries extended the scope of the debate by bringing into the discussion additional perspectives. My response addresses all these issues. By considering the constraints of neurobiology on modeling reading, developmental data, and a large scope of cross-linguistic evidence, I argue that front-end implementations of orthographic processing that do not stem from a comprehensive theory of the complex information conveyed by writing systems do not present a viable approach for understanding reading. The common principles by which writing systems have evolved to represent orthographic, phonological, and semantic information in a language reveal the critical distributional characteristics of orthographic structure that govern reading behavior. Models of reading should thus be learning models, primarily constrained by cross-linguistic developmental evidence that describes how the statistical properties of writing systems shape the characteristics of orthographic processing. When this approach is adopted, a universal model of reading is possible. (shrink)

A skeptic claims that I do not have knowledge of the external world. It has been thought that the skeptic reaches this conclusion because she employs unusually stringent standards for knowledge. But the skeptic does not employ unusually high standards for knowledge. Rather, she employs unusually restrictive standards of evidence. Thus, her claim that we lack knowledge of the external world is supported by considerations that would equally support the claim that we lack evidence for our beliefs about the external (...) world. These considerations do not threaten the truth of our ordinary attributions of evidence, however, for such attributions are context‐sensitive in their semantics.It is argued that this solution to the problem of the external world enjoys all of the benefits. and suffers none of the problems, of other solutions to the problem of the external world. (shrink)

Your evidence constrains your rational degrees of confidence both locally and globally. On the one hand, particular bits of evidence can boost or diminish your rational degree of confidence in various hypotheses, relative to your background information. On the other hand, epistemic rationality requires that, for any hypothesis h, your confidence in h is proportional to the support that h receives from your total evidence. Why is it that your evidence has these two epistemic powers? I argue that various proposed (...) accounts of what it is for something to be an element of your evidence set cannot answer this question. I then propose an alternative account of what it is for something to be an element of your evidence set. 1. Introduction2. The elements of one's evidence set are propositions3. Which kinds of propositions are in one's evidence set?3.1. Doxastic accounts of evidence3.2. Non-doxastic accounts of evidence4. Elaborating and defending the LIE. (shrink)

This article explores several entanglements between human judgments of intentionality and morality (blame and praise). After proposing a model of people’s folk concept of intentionality I discuss three topics. First, considerations of a behavior’s intentionality a ff ect people’s praise and blame of that behavior, but one study suggests that there may be an asymmetry such that blame is more affected than praise. Second, the concept of intentionality is constitutive of many legal judgments (e.g., of murder vs. manslaughter), and one (...) study illustrates people’s subtle considerations of intentionality in making those judgments. Third, controversial recent studies suggest that moral considerations can affect judgments of intentionality, and an asymmetry may exist such that blame a ff ects those judgments more than praise. I report two new studies that may shed light on these recent findings, and I discuss several theoretical models that might account for the impact of moral considerations on intentionality judgments and for the relationship between the two more generally. (shrink)

I here describe meanings attributed to the term consciousness, extracted from the literature and from recent online discussions. Forty such meanings were identified and categorized according to whether they were principally about function or about experience; some overlapped but others were apparently mutually exclusive - and this list is by no means exhaustive. Most can be regarded as expressions of authors' views about the basis of con-sciousness, or opinions about the significance of aspects of its con-tents. The prospects for reaching (...) any single, agreed, theory independent definition of consciousness thus appear remote. How-ever, much confusion could be avoided if authors were always to spec-ify which aspects of consciousness they refer to when using the term. An example is outlined of how this can be done. (shrink)

Sometimes, there are reasons for which we believe, intend, resent, decide, and so on: these reasons are the “bases” of the latter, and the explanatory relation between these bases and the latter is what I will call “the basing relation.” What kind of explanatory relation is this? Dispositionalists claim that the basing relation consists in the agent’s manifesting a disposition to respond to those bases by having the belief, intention, resentment, and so on, in question. Representationalists claim that the basing (...) relation consists in the agent’s representing the bases as justifying the belief, intention, resentment, and so on, in question. This article shows that an adequate account of the basing relation requires a particular refinement and combination of these two views. On the hybrid account defended here, the basing relation involves a disposition exercise that is individuated by the agent’s object-involving de se representation of that very exercise as justifying. (shrink)

Moral psychology—broadly speaking, the study of how people reason and act morally—has a long and productive history. Initially a subfield of philosophy, it posed groundbreaking questions about the nature of values and virtues, the balance of reason and emotion, and the gap between “is” and “ought.” In the twentieth century, the rise of psychology expanded the a priori philosophical enterprise into an empirical science. In psychology, perspectives of development, social interaction, cognition, and neuroscience brought new understanding and new questions. Over (...) the past few decades, moral psychology has emerged as one of the most vital fields in the human sciences. The Cambridge Handbook of Moral Psychology offers a state-of-the-art guide to this rapidly expanding field. It introduces central questions and recent insights, traces continuing puzzles and debates, and integrates empirical and theoretical perspectives. The interdisciplinary character of the volume reflects the fact that contemporary research in moral psychology is deeply informed by many disciplines and traditions, from its philosophical roots to its latest scientific discoveries in psychology, anthropology, sociology, behavioral economics, and more. (shrink)

Even though morally competent artificial agents have yet to emerge in society, we need insights from empirical science into how people will respond to such agents and how these responses should inform agent design. Three survey studies presented participants with an artificial intelligence agent, an autonomous drone, or a human drone pilot facing a moral dilemma in a military context: to either launch a missile strike on a terrorist compound but risk the life of a child, or to cancel the (...) strike to protect the child but risk a terrorist attack. Seventy-two percent of respondents were comfortable making moral judgments about the AI in this scenario and fifty-one percent were comfortable making moral judgments about the autonomous drone. These participants applied the same norms to the two artificial agents and the human drone pilot. However, people ascribed different patterns of blame to humans and machines as a function of the agent’s decision of how to solve the dilemma. These differences in blame seem to stem from different assumptions about the agents’ embeddedness in social structures and the moral justifications those structures afford. Specifically, people less readily see artificial agents as embedded in social structures and, as a result, they explained and justified their actions differently. As artificial agents will perform many actions with moral significance, we must heed such differences in justifications and blame and probe how they affect our interactions with those agents. (shrink)

People’s folk theory of consciousness encompasses three prototypes of conscious mental functioning: monitoring (awareness), choice, and subjective experience. All three are embedded in a broader folk theory of mind and thus closely linked to the concept of intentionality, action explanation, and a conception of free will. At least some of the prototypes of consciousness play a critical role in the assignment of personhood and responsibility. Recent discussions question the viability of folk conceptions of consciousness in light of work on the (...) unconscious and neuroscience. Thus far this work appears to complement folk conceptions without contradicting them. (shrink)

Stephen Schiffer has argued that contextualist solutions to skepticism rest on an implausible “error theory” concerning our own semantic intentions. Similar arguments have recently been offered also by Thomas Hofweber and Patrick Rysiew. I attempt to show how contextualists can rebut these arguments. The kind of self‐knowledge that contextualists are committed to denying us is not a kind of self‐knowledge that we need, nor is it a kind of self‐knowledge that we can plausibly be thought to possess.

In his recent Knowledge and its Limits, Timothy Williamson argues that no non-trivial mental state is such that being in that state suffices for one to be in a position to know that one is in it. In short, there are no “luminous” mental states. His argument depends on a “safety” requirement on knowledge, that one’s confident belief could not easily have been wrong if it is to count as knowledge. We argue that the safety requirement is ambiguous; on one (...) interpretation it is obviously true but useless to his argument, and on the other interpretation it is false. (shrink)