Die Unvollkommenheit des Menschen zwingt ihn biologisch zu Kompensationen, die in den kulturellen Leistungen zum Ausdruck kommen. Psychologisch bedeutet diese Unvollkommenheit eine Offenheit hinsichtlich einer unendlichen Vielfalt schöpferischer Möglichkeiten. Während Alfred Adlers Überlegungen auf den Finalismus einer idealen Gemeinschaft als die noch zu vollendende Evolution zielen, stellen Sigmund Freud und Donald W. Winnicott die Unabschließbarkeit seelischer Entwicklungen heraus. Die Unvollkommenheit des Seelischen kann sich in alle Richtungen entfalten, muss aber dabei immer mit den unvermeidlichen Konsequenzen rechnen. Das Umgehen mit (...) unserer Unvollkommenheit kann durchaus misslingen und führt zu Abwehrmaßnahmen, durch die die Menschen gottähnlich werden wollen. (shrink)

Wege zur Todlosigkeit. Tod und Transzendez in der Lehre des Buddha. Alfred Weil. Universität Konstanz, Forschungsprojekt 'Buddhistischer Modernismus', Forschungsberichte 8, Konstanz 1993. 202pp. No price given.

O apontamento-Lenzerheide, de 7 de junho de 1887 é considerado um texto central sobre o entendimento de Nietzsche a respeito do niilismo. Ele o redigiu num trem, na estação entre Chur e Sils Maria, depois de ter concluído o quinto livro de A Gaia Ciência, seu mais corajoso, profundo e sereno livro de aforismos, e, portanto, antes de ter redigido em Sils Maria, em poucas semanas, as três dissertações de Para a Genealogia da Moral. Entre ambas as coisas, parece que (...) ele tentou tornar claro para si o todo de seu pensamento, e, nesse processo, particularmente a conexão dos temas suscitados em Assim Falou Zaratustra: os temas do niilismo, do além-do-homem, da vontade de poder, do eterno retorno do mesmo e da ordem de escalonamento (Rangordnung). Na maioria das vezes, isto foi compreendido de um modo tal que Nietzsche, com isso, aproxima-se mais fortemente de um “sistema” como, em particular, Alfred Baumler e Martin Heidegger tentaram construí-lo. A nova edição do espólio de Nietzsche, na transcrição diferenciada da Seção IX da edição completa das obras de Nietzsche permite conhecer mais precisamente como Nietzsche se orientou em seu pensamento e como elaborou, passo a passo, seus pensamentos. Neste estudo, o apontamento de Lenzerheide é lido tendo em vista o processo de orientação que nele se realiza, e são tornadas claras as decisões de orientação que Nietzsche toma de parágrafo para parágrafo. Ao final, não resulta daí nenhum sistema, mas um distanciamento da “magia do extremo”, que Nietzsche primeiramente segue, ao longo de muitos parágrafos. Nietzsche medita (besinnt) sobre os pontos extremos de seu filosofar, e os retoma. Ele só faz isso aqui, no apontamento-Lenzerheide. Isso significa que, também com o niilismo, tem-se que viver comedidamente (maßvoll). (shrink)

Das Nichtwissen ist in aller Munde. Von Nichtwissenskulturen in der zweiten oder reflexiven Moderne ist die Rede, von Agnotologie als neuem Forschungszweig, von wicked problems und ihren clumsy solutions. Wo Nichtwissen sich durch Komplexitäts­steigerung unwiderruflich im zu Wissenden einnistet, fordert es als Grenze, Schranke und Kehrseite des Wissens die sogenannte Wissensgesellschaft heraus. Vor allem Risiko­poten­ziale und Gefahren kommen hier in den Blick, von denen wir gerade genug wissen, um Wissensansprüche zu formulieren, die sich womöglich nie einlösen lassen. Das klassisch erkenntnistheoretische (...) Problem: „Was können wir wissen?“ steht heute in einem Spannungsverhältnis zu der wissenspolitischen Frage: „Was müssen wir wissen?“ Was wir wissen müssen, ist einerseits so viel wie nötig, wenn es um Fragen von Sicherheit und Gesundheit geht – andererseits aber so wenig wie möglich, wenn es in Alltag, Wirtschaft oder Wissen­schaft darauf ankommt, Wissen an technische Systeme oder Expertenkulturen zu delegieren. Bezeichnet politisch handlungsorientiertes und wissenschaftliches Nichtwissen zunächst ein Defizit, ist technisches Nichtwissen gleichermaßen erstrebenswert und problematisch. Einige, die Technik für angewandtes Wissen halten, mögen darin eine contradictio in adjecto sehen, manche sich um eine dem technischen Nichtwissen geschuldeten Technik­feindlichkeit sorgen, andere daraus die nötige Demut gegen verstiegene Allmachts­fantasien beziehen, während ihre Gegenspieler von Maschinen träumen, die über den Horizont intellektueller Nachvollziehbarkeit immer weiter hinauseilen. Mit Beiträgen von: Suzana Alpsancar, Lars Bullmann, Marcus Burkhardt, Eoin Carney, Pelle Ehn, Stefan Frisch, Gerhard Gamm, Petra Gehring, Till Greite, Hans Hasse, Andreas Kaminski, Gregor Kanitz, Matthias Koch, Christian Köhler, Johannes Lenhard, Alexandre Métraux, Alfred Nordmann, Tanja Paulitz, Tom Poljanšek, Sandra Pravica, Katrin Solhdju, Werner Sombart, Florian Sprenger, Sebastian Vehlken und Rüdiger Zill. (shrink)

The controversy between Alfred Werner and Sophus Mads Jørgensen over the structure of complex inorganic compounds is not among the best known of the many controversies in the history of chemistry, but it is one of the most thoroughly described in the historical literature. This is due almost solely to the works of George Kauffman, the distinguished American historian of chemistry and specialist in the history of coordination chemistry. Kauffman has described and analysed almost every aspect of the (...) development of coordination chemistry and has in several works dealt with the Werner–Jørgensen controversy which ran from 1894 to 1899. Because of Kauffman's expertise and many works in the area, his account is likely to be taken as authoritative and his conclusions repeated in later historical works. This paper argues that this is unwarranted at least in one particular respect, namely the evaluation of Jørgensen and the way the controversy terminated. Kauffman's version of this episode has frequently appeared in print during a period of thirty-five years, first in 1959 and most recently in 1994. My conclusion is that it cannot survive critical examination. (shrink)

Self-deception raises complex questions about the nature of belief and the structure of the human mind. In this book, Alfred Mele addresses four of the most critical of these questions: What is it to deceive oneself? How do we deceive ourselves? Why do we deceive ourselves? Is self-deception really possible? -/- Drawing on cutting-edge empirical research on everyday reasoning and biases, Mele takes issue with commonplace attempts to equate the processes of self-deception with those of stereotypical interpersonal deception. Such (...) attempts, he demonstrates, are fundamentally misguided, particularly in the assumption that self-deception is intentional. In their place, Mele proposes a compelling, empirically informed account of the motivational causes of biased beliefs. At the heart of this theory is an appreciation of how emotion and motivation may, without our knowing it, bias our assessment of evidence for beliefs. Highlighting motivation and emotion, Mele develops a pair of approaches for explaining the two forms of self-deception: the "straight" form, in which we believe what we want to be true, and the "twisted" form, in which we believe what we wish to be false. -/- Underlying Mele's work is an abiding interest in understanding and explaining the behavior of real human beings. The result is a comprehensive, elegant, empirically grounded theory of everyday self-deception that should engage philosophers and social scientists alike. (shrink)

The author demonstrates that certain forms of irrationality - incontinent action and self-deception - which many philosophers have rejected as being logically or psychologically impossible, are indeed possible.

Each of the following claims has been defended in the scientific literature on free will and consciousness: your brain routinely decides what you will do before you become conscious of its decision; there is only a 100 millisecond window of opportunity for free will, and all it can do is veto conscious decisions, intentions, or urges; intentions never play a role in producing corresponding actions; and free will is an illusion. In Effective Intentions Alfred Mele shows that the evidence (...) offered to support these claims is sorely deficient. He also shows that there is strong empirical support for the thesis that some conscious decisions and intentions have a genuine place in causal explanations of corresponding actions. In short, there is weighty evidence of the existence of effective conscious intentions or the power of conscious will. Mele examines the accuracy of subjects' reports about when they first became aware of decisions or intentions in laboratory settings and develops some implications of warranted skepticism about the accuracy of these reports. In addition, he explores such questions as whether we must be conscious of all of our intentions and why scientists disagree about this. Mele's final chapter closes with a discussion of imaginary scientific findings that would warrant bold claims about free will and consciousness of the sort he examines in this book. (shrink)

Big data biology—bioinformatics, computational biology, systems biology (including ‘omics’), and synthetic biology—raises a number of issues for the philosophy of science. This article deals with several such: Is data-intensive biology a new kind of science, presumably post-reductionistic? To what extent is big data biology data-driven? Can data ‘speak for themselves?’ I discuss these issues by way of a reflection on Carl Woese’s worry that “a society that permits biology to become an engineering discipline, that allows that science to slip into (...) the role of changing the living world without trying to understand it, is a danger to itself.” And I argue that scientific perspectivism, a philosophical stance represented prominently by Giere, Van Fraassen, and Wimsatt, according to which science cannot as a matter of principle transcend our human perspective, provides the best resources currently at our disposal to tackle many of the philosophical issues implied in the modeling of complex, multilevel/multiscale phenomena. (shrink)

According to an optimistic view, affective empathy is a route to knowledge of what it is like to be in the target person’s state (“phenomenal knowledge”). Roughly, the idea is that the empathizer gains this knowledge by means of empathically experiencing the target’s emotional state. The literature on affective empathy, however, often draws a simplified picture according to which the target feels only a single emotion at a time. Co-occurring emotions (“concurrent emotions”) are rarely considered. This is problematic, because concurring (...) emotions seem to support a sceptical view according to which we cannot gain phenomenal knowledge of the target person’s state by means of affective empathy. The sceptic concludes that attaining the epistemic goal of affective empathy is difficult, in practice often impossible. I accept the sceptic’s premises, but reject the conclusion, because of the argument’s unjustified, hidden premise: that the epistemic goal of affective empathy is phenomenal knowledge. I argue that the epistemic goal of affective empathy is phenomenal understanding, not knowledge. Attention to the under-explored phenomenon of concurring emotions clarifies why this is important. I argue that this is the decisive epistemic progress in everyday cases of phenomenal understanding of another person. (shrink)

Science and Sanity has by now spawned a whole library of works by other time- binders. Some of them have been listed in previous editions. ...

Two questions guide this article. First, according to Fischer and Ravizza (jointly and otherwise), what epistemic requirements for being morally responsible for performing an action A are not also requirements for freely performing A? Second, how much progress have they made on this front? The article's main moral is for philosophers who believe that there are epistemic requirements for being morally responsible for A-ing that are not requirements for freely A-ing because they assume that Fischer (on his own or otherwise) (...) has shown that this is so. In showing that this assumption is false, I reopen an important question for these philosophers: How are epistemic requirements for being morally responsible for A-ing related to requirements for freely A-ing? This is an interesting question in its own right, of course. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Mele uses survey methods of experimental philosophy to argue that folk notions of freedom and responsibility do not really require any dubious mind–body dualism. In his comment, Nadelhoffer questions Mele's interpretation of the experiments and adds contrary data of his own. Vargas then suggests that Mele overlooks yet another threat to free will—sourcehood. Mele replies by reinterpreting Nadelhoffer's data and rejecting Vargas’ claim that free will requires sourcehood.

Der Band vereinigt 20 Studien zu Nietzsche von Werner Stegmaier, der in den vergangenen drei Jahrzehnten der internationalen Nietzsche-Forschung starke Impulse gegeben und zuletzt achtzehn Jahre lang, zusammen mit Günter Abel, die Nietzsche-Studien, das international führende Organ der Nietzsche-Forschung, geleitet und die Monographien und Texte zur Nietzsche-Forschung herausgegeben hat. Die Studien handeln von Grundfragen der Philosophie Nietzsches. Sie setzen ein (I) mit seiner Neubestimmung der Wahrheit und der Philosophie und (II) seiner Verzeitlichung des Denkens unter (III) Verzicht auf, die (...) Vernunft' bei der Bestimmung des Menschen, interpretieren von hier aus (IV) die Anti-Lehren von Nietzsches Zarathustra, umreissen (V) Nietzsches Ethik für, gute Europäer' und schliessen (VI) mit der Interpretation von Nietzsches Selbsteinschätzung als Schicksal der Philosophie und der Menschheit (Ecce homo, Warum ich ein Schicksal bin 1) und einer Einschätzung von Nietzsches Zukunft, die schon seit über einem Jahrhundert begonnen hat. Werner Stegmaier, Jahrgang 1946, war Gründungsdirektor des Instituts für Philosophie der Universität Greifswald nach dem Zusammenbruch der Sowjetunion und baute das Nord- und osteuropäische Forum für Philosophie auf, das Institute für Philosophie rund um die Ostsee neu miteinander ins Gespräch brachte und dort zu philosophischen Neuorientierungen beitrug. Er hat auf vielfältigen Gebieten gearbeitet, unter anderem zur Metaphysik und ihrem Grundbegriff der Substanz, zu grossen Philosophen von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, zur philosophischen Aktualität der jüdischen Tradition, vor allem aber zur Philosophie Nietzsches. Dabei ging es ihm stets um Fragen der Ersten Philosophie, insbesondere die, was unsere Realität ausmacht, wie sie durch Zeichen und Kommunikation vermittelt wird, wie Begriffe in der Zeit existieren und womit man es beim Denken zu tun hat. Er führte den Begriff der Orientierung als elementaren Begriff der Philosophie ein und entwickelte eine umfassende Philosophie der Orientierung."--Publisher's website. (shrink)

One of the major philosophical texts of the 20th century, Process and Reality is based on Alfred North Whitehead’s influential lectures that he delivered at the University of Edinburgh in the 1920s on process philosophy. Whitehead’s master work in philsophy, Process and Reality propounds a system of speculative philosophy, known as process philosophy, in which the various elements of reality into a consistent relation to each other. It is also an exploration of some of the preeminent thinkers of the (...) seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as Descartes, Newton, Locke, and Kant. The ultimate edition of Whitehead’s magnum opus, Process and Reality is a standard reference for scholars of all backgrounds. (shrink)

_Requiem for the Ego_ recounts Freud's last great attempt to 'save' the autonomy of the ego, which drew philosophical criticism from the most prominent philosophers of the period—Adorno, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. Despite their divergent orientations, each contested the ego's capacity to represent mental states through word and symbol to an agent surveying its own cognizance. By discarding the subject-object divide as a model of the mind, they dethroned Freud's depiction of the ego as a conceit of a misleading self-consciousness and (...) a faulty metaphysics. Freud's inquisitors, while employing divergent arguments, found unacknowledged consensus in identifying the core philosophical challenges of defining agency and describing subjectivity. In _Requiem_, Tauber uniquely synthesizes these philosophical attacks against psychoanalysis and, more generally, provides a kaleidoscopic portrait of the major developments in mid-20th century philosophy that prepared the conceptual grounding for postmodernism. (shrink)

Proponents of impure moral perception claim that, while there are perceptual moral experiences, these experiences epistemically depend on a priori moral knowledge. Proponents of pure moral perception claim that moral experiences can justify independently of substantive a priori moral knowledge. Some philosophers, most notably David Faraci, have argued that the pure view is mistaken, since moral perception requires previous moral background knowledge, and such knowledge could not itself be perceptual. I defend pure moral perception against this objection. I consider two (...) ways to understand the notion of “background knowledge” that is crucial to the objection. On a reading, the claim that background knowledge is necessary for moral perception is likely false. On a second and weaker reading, the claim is true, but the background knowledge in question could be perceptual, and thus compatible with pure moral perception. Thus, the objection fails. (shrink)

The differential activation hypothesis (DAH; Teasdale, 1988) proposes that individuals who are vulnerable to depression can be distinguished from non-vulnerable individuals by the degree to which negative thoughts and maladaptive cognitive processes are activated during sad mood. While retrieval of negative autobiographical memories is noted as one such process, the model does not articulate a role for deficits in recalling positive memories. Two studies were conducted to compare the autobiographical memory characteristics of never-depressed and formerly depressed individuals following a sad (...) mood induction. In Study 1, features of negative memories of never-depressed and formerly depressed individuals did not differ, either in neutral or sad mood. For positive memories, groups did not differ in neutral mood, but following a sad mood induction, formerly depressed individuals rated their positive memories as less vivid than their never-depressed counterparts. Study 2 examined positive autobiographical memory features more comprehensively and replicated the finding that in a sad mood formerly depressed individuals recalled less vivid positive memories than never-depressed controls. These findings suggest that the phenomenological features of positive memories could represent an important factor in depressive vulnerability, and, more broadly, that depression may be associated with a deficit in the processing of positive material. (shrink)