The desire for founding educational reform on a sound empirical basis has coincided with a period of impressive progress in the field of neuroscience and wide public interest in its findings, leading to an ongoing debate about the potential of neuroscience to inform education reform. But is neuroscience really suited to provide specific instructions for improving learning conditions at school? This paper explores the educational implications of neuroscience.

This book is about the nature of sensory perception. Contributions focus on five questions, i.e.: (1) What distinguishes sensory perception from other cognitive states? Is it true, for instance, that perceptual content, in contrast to the phenomenal content of sensations like pain, always depends on the perceivers conceptual resources? (2) How do we have to explain the intentionality of perceptual states? (3) What is the nature of perceptual content? (4) In which sense do the objects of sensory perception depend on (...) the constitution of the perceiver? How, for instance, do secondary qualities like colours, sounds and smells depend on the perception of human subjects? (5) How can we account for the intentionality of misperceptions? These questions are addressed through the interpretation of classical historical texts as well as in the context of systematical reflections. With contributions by Margaret Atherton, Michael Ayers, Peter Baumann, Martha Brandt Bolton, Thomas Grundmann, Gary Hatfield, Rolf-Peter Horstmann, Andreas Kemmerling, Bertram Kienzle, Martine Nida-Rümelin, Dominik Perler, Jay F. Rosenberg, Katia Saporiti, Ralph Schumacher, Gerald Vision, and Russell Wahl. (shrink)

Die fünf Bände enthalten die überarbeiteten Fassungen aller Haupt- und Sektionsvorträge des IX. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses, der im März 2000 an der Berliner Humboldt-Universität stattfand. Die Beiträge gliedern sich in die folgenden Sektionen: Der vorkritische Kant, Kants Theoretische Philosophie, Kants Praktische Philosophie, Kants Ästhetik, Kants Religionsphilosophie, Kants Geschichtsphilosophie, Kants Rechts-, Staats- und Politische Philosophie, Kants Anthropologie, Kants Naturphilosophie und das Opus postumum, Kants Logik, Kant und die Aufklärung, Kant, Deutscher Idealismus und Neukantianismus, Kant und die Folgen. Zu den Autoren zählen u.a. (...) Manfred Baum, Mario Caimi, Konrad Cramer, Jean Ferrari, Eckhardt Förster, Michael Friedman, Simone Goyard-Fabre, Paul Guyer, Gary Hatfield, Agnes Heller, Dieter Henrich, Otfried Höffe, Wolfgang Kersting, Béatrice Longuenesse, Onora O'Neill, Robert Pippin, Gerold Prauss und Michael Wolff. (shrink)

Im Mittelpunkt dieser Arbeit steht die Frage, ob sich Aussagen über die Grenzen der Irrationalität von Personen a priori rechtfertigen lassen: Gibt es bestimmte Rationalitätsanforderungen, die mit rein begrifflichen Argumenten als für alle Personen verbindlich ausgewiesen werden können ? Um diese Frage differenziert zu beantworten, wird eine Unterscheidung zwischen zwei Arten von Rationalitätsanforderungen eingeführt: Rationalitätsstandards und Rationalitätsbedingungen. Es wird dafür argumentiert, daß sich unabhängig von der Erfahrung ausschließlich Aussagen über den Umfang der Rationalität von Personen begründen lassen. Personen müssen demnach (...) wenigstens minimal rational sein, damit ihnen propositionale Einstellungen wie Überzeugungen und Absichten zugeschrieben werden können. Hingegen läßt sich anhand rein begrifflicher Argumente nicht entscheiden, welche Rationalitätsstandards von Personen erfüllt werden müssen, um Träger propositionaler Einstellungen sein zu können. Dies ist durchaus damit verträglich, daß sich a priori Rationalitätsbedingungen festlegen lassen, welche die Eingangsbedingungen dafür darstellen, daß Subjekte überhaupt als Kandidaten für rationales oder irrationales Verhalten aufgefaßt werden können. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to defend a broad concept of visual perception, according to which it is a sufficient condition for visual perception that subjects receive visual information in a way which enables them to give reliably correct answers about the objects presented to them. According to this view, blindsight, non-epistemic seeing, and conscious visual experience count as proper types of visual perception. This leads to two consequences concerning the role of the phenomenal qualities of visual experiences. First, (...) phenomenal qualities are not necessary in order to see something, because in the case of blindsight, subjects can see objects without experiences phenomenal qualities. Second, they cannot be intentional properties, since they are not essential properties of visual experiences, and because the content of visual experiences cannot be constituted by contingent properties. (shrink)

Optische Täuschungen ändern ihr Aussehen nicht in Abhängigkeit von unserem Kenntnisstand. Sie sind damit gegenüber unseren Überzeugungen kognitiv undurchdringbar. Wie läßt sich dies erklären, und kann die kognitive Undurchdringbarkeit optischer Täuschungen als Beleg dafür interpretiert werden, dass es völlig theoriefreie Wahrnehmungen gibt? Im folgenden wird dafür argumentiert, dass Berkeleys Wahrnehmungstheorie überzeugendere Antworten auf diese Fragen liefert als Jerry Fodors Theorie der Modularität des Geistes. Berkeleys Ansatz ist deshalb besonders interessant, weil er die Fähigkeit zur visuellen Wahrnehmung geometrischer Eigenschaften als Resultat (...) von Lern- und Assoziationsprozessen darstellt. Wie die Dinge für uns aussehen, hängt demnach davon ab, welche Erfahrungen und Gewohnheiten wir erworben haben. Im Unterschied zu Fodors Theorie ist Berkeleys Ansatz in der Lage, die kognitive Undurchdringbarkeit optischer Täuschungen zu erklären und dabei gleichzeitig ihrem epistemischen Charakter Rechnung zu tragen. (shrink)

One of the main targets of Barry Stroud’s criticism in his recent book ‚The Quest for Reality. Subjectivism and the Metaphysics of Colour’ are eliminativist theories of colour which he regards as a version of the metaphysical project of the unmasking of colours (Stroud, 2000). According to this view, no physical objects have any of the colours we see them or believe them to have. However, although this error theory describes all our colour perceptions as illusory, and all our colour (...) beliefs as false, it cannot deny that we actually perceive colours and that we do believe that physical objects are coloured. Therefore, it has to account for these psychological facts without relying on any assumptions about the colours of things. Thus, the central question for the unmasking project is whether it is possible to acknowledge someone’s perceiving a certain colour or having beliefs about the colours of things without holding that anything anywhere has any colour at all. Contrary to Stroud, this paper defends the view that we can acknowledge that people believe in colours without having ourselves to accept their existence. (shrink)

Since our visual perception of physical things essentially involves our identifying objects by their colours, any theory of visual perception must contain some account of the colours of things. The central problem with colour has to do with relating our normal, everyday colour perceptions to what science, i.e. physics, teaches us about physical objects and their qualities. Although we perceive colours as categorical surface properties of things, colour perceptions are explained by introducing physical properties like reflectance profiles or dispositions to (...) cause certain experiences in normal human perceivers. Hence, it seems as if colours as they are experienced by us have no place in the physical world, because they are fundamentally different from the properties which we ascribe to physical objects in scientific accounts of colour perceptions. This special issue on perspectives on colour perception presents new suggestions to solve to this major problem. (shrink)

Während in der Forschungsliteratur zu Berkeleys Theorien bis in die 70er Jahre des vergangenen Jahrhunderts Gesamtdarstellungen dominierten, in denen es wie zum Beispiel in den Monographien von A. A. Luce, Ian Tipton und George Pitcher um die Kritik oder Verteidigung seines Immaterialismus und direkten Realismus geht, konzentriert sich die Diskussion seit den 80er Jahren auf die Untersuchung historischer Entwicklungslinien sowie auf einzelne konzeptuelle und argumentative Beiträge Berkeleys zur Erkenntnistheorie und Metaphysik. Im folgenden wird anhand von drei zentralen Fragestellungen ein repräsentativer (...) Überblick über die Forschungsliteratur zu Berkeleys Philosophie gegeben: Auf welche Weise kritisiert Berkeley den Repräsentationalismus, und wie verteidigt er seinen Immaterialismus? Wird Berkeley seinem Anspruch gerecht, unserem Alltagsrealismus in wesentlichen Punkten Rechnung zu tragen? Wodurch zeichnet sich Berkeleys direkter Realismus aus? (shrink)

Theoretical Laws and Normative Rules: Kant and Bolzano's Views on Logic'"1" Anita Von Duhn, Genf Does logic instruct us how to think correctly? ...

This book contributes to current bioethical debates by providing a critical analysis of the philosophy of human death. Bernard N. Schumacher discusses contemporary philosophical perspectives on death, creating a dialogue between phenomenology, existentialism, and analytic philosophy. He also examines the ancient philosophies that have shaped our current ideas about death. His analysis focuses on three fundamental problems: (1) the definition of human death, (2) the knowledge of mortality and of human death as such, and (3) the question of whether (...) death is nothing to us or, on the contrary, whether it can be regarded as an absolute or relative evil. Drawing on scholarship published in four languages and from three distinct currents of thought, this volume represents a comprehensive and systematic study of the philosophy of death, one that provides a provocative basis for discussions of the bioethics of human mortality. (shrink)

Moral disagreement has long been thought to create serious problems for certain views in metaethics. More specifically, moral disagreement has been thought to pose problems for any metaethical view that rejects relativism—that is, for any view that implies that whenever two thinkers disagree about a moral question, at least one of those thinkers’ beliefs about the question is not correct. In this essay, I shall outline a solution to one of these problems. As I shall argue, it turns out in (...) the end that this problem is not really a special problem about moral disagreement at all: it is a general problem about disagreement as such. For this reason, in the later sections of this essay, I shall turn to some general questions in epistemology, about the epistemic significance of disagreement. (shrink)

For much of the modern period, theologians and philosophers of religion have struggled with the problem of proving that it is rational to believe in God. Drawing on the thought of Thomas Aquinas, Theological Philosophy seeks to overturn the longstanding problem of proving faith's rationality and to establish instead that rationality requires to be explained by appeals to faith. Building on a constructive argument developed in a companion book, Rationality as Virtue, Lydia Schumacher advances the conclusion that belief in (...) the God of Christian faith provides an exceptionally robust rationale for rationality and is as such intrinsically rational. (shrink)

This book gives a general theory of rational belief. Although it can be read by itself, is a sequel to the author's previous book The Value of Rationality (Oxford, 2017). It takes the general conception of rationality that was defended in that earlier book, and combines it with an account of the varieties of belief, and of what it is for these beliefs to count as "correct", to develop an account of what it is for beliefs to count as rational. (...) According to this account, rationality comes in degrees: the degree to which one's beliefs counts as rational is determined by their distance from a corresponding probability function - where this distance is measured by those beliefs' "expected degree of incorrectness" according to the probability function; the account also involves an explanation of what determines exactly which probability function plays this role in each case, and of why this probability function should play this role. In developing and defending this account, new light is shed on several central epistemological issues. These issues include: the distinction between propositional and doxastic justification; the debates between internalism and externalism, and between foundationalism and coherentism; the significance - or lack of it - of the notion of 'evidence'; the relationship between credences, full belief, inference, and suspension of judgment; the nature of the kind of possibility that is presupposed by the relevant sort of probability; and whether rationality is "diachronic" - so that the beliefs that it is rational for us to have now depend, in part, on the beliefs that we held in the past. Finally, some suggestions are made about how this theory bears on a range of further topics, including the defeasibility of inference, scepticism, and the analysis of knowledge. (shrink)

During the last years of his life, the mathematician Karl Menger worked on a biography of his father, the economist and founder of the Austrian School of Economics, Carl Menger. The younger Menger never finished the work. While working in the Menger collections at Duke University’s David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, we discovered draft chapters of the biography, a valuable source of information given that relatively little is known about Carl Menger’s life nearly a hundred years after (...) his death. The unfinished biography covers Carl Menger’s family background and his life through early 1889. In this article, we discuss the biography and the most valuable new insights it provides into Carl Menger’s life, including Carl Menger’s family, his childhood, his student years, his time working as a journalist and newspaper editor, his early scientific career, and his relationship with Crown Prince Rudolf. (shrink)

Most approaches to animal ethics ground the moral standing of nonhumans in some appeal to their capacities for intelligent autonomy or mental sentience. _Corporal Compassion _emphasizes the phenomenal and somatic commonality of living beings; a philosophy of body that seeks to displace any notion of anthropomorphic empathy in viewing the moral experiences of nonhuman living beings. Ralph R. Acampora employs phenomenology, hermeneutics, existentialism and deconstruction to connect and contest analytic treatments of animal rights and liberation theory. In doing so, (...) he focuses on issues of being and value, and posits a felt nexus of bodily being, termed symphysis, to devise an interspecies ethos. Acampora uses this broad-based bioethic to engage in dialogue with other strains of environmental ethics and ecophilosophy. _Corporal Compassion_ examines the practical applications of the somatic ethos in contexts such as laboratory experimentation and zoological exhibition, and challenges practitioners to go beyond recent reforms and look to a future beyond exploitation or total noninterference--a posthumanist culture that advocates caring in a participatory approach. (shrink)

SCHUMACHER: ÜBERWIN. WIEDERGEBURT ANTIKE MOD. MEDIZIN.

Paris, 1943. In a flash, a book is published that will shape post-war Europe like none other. Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness discloses utterly new insights about human freedom, about feelings such as shame and desire, and about death. The new edition of the renowned book of commentary on the magnum opus of French existentialism opens access to the work through the latest state of research.