Albert approaches critical rationalism as an alternative to other philosophical standpoints dominant in Germany: the conceptions of the Frankfurt School, hermeneutical thinking as represented by Gadamer, analytic philosophy, and logical empiricism. The author's purpose is to find a way out of the foundationalism of classical philosophy without falling back on the skeptical views so prevalent in today's philosophical thinking. Originally published in 1985. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from (...) the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

Die MISCELLANEA MEDIAEVALIA präsentieren seit ihrer Gründung durch Paul Wilpert im Jahre 1962 Arbeiten des Thomas-Instituts der Universität zu Köln. Das Kernstück der Publikationsreihe bilden die Akten der im zweijährigen Rhythmus stattfindenden Kölner Mediaevistentagungen, die vor über 50 Jahren von Josef Koch, dem Gründungsdirektor des Instituts, ins Leben gerufen wurden. Der interdisziplinäre Charakter dieser Kongresse prägt auch die Tagungsakten: Die MISCELLANEA MEDIAEVALIA versammeln Beiträge aus allen mediävistischen Disziplinen - die mittelalterliche Geschichte, die Philosophie, die Theologie sowie die Kunst- und Literaturwissenschaften (...) sind Teile einer Gesamtbetrachtung des Mittelalters. (shrink)

Die MISCELLANEA MEDIAEVALIA präsentieren seit ihrer Gründung durch Paul Wilpert im Jahre 1962 Arbeiten des Thomas-Instituts der Universität zu Köln. Das Kernstück der Publikationsreihe bilden die Akten der im zweijährigen Rhythmus stattfindenden Kölner Mediaevistentagungen, die vor über 50 Jahren von Josef Koch, dem Gründungsdirektor des Instituts, ins Leben gerufen wurden. Der interdisziplinäre Charakter dieser Kongresse prägt auch die Tagungsakten: Die MISCELLANEA MEDIAEVALIA versammeln Beiträge aus allen mediävistischen Disziplinen - die mittelalterliche Geschichte, die Philosophie, die Theologie sowie die Kunst- und Literaturwissenschaften (...) sind Teile einer Gesamtbetrachtung des Mittelalters. (shrink)

Charles Sanders Peirce is generally regarded as the founder of pragmatism, and one of the greatest ever American philosophers. Peirce is also widely known for his work on truth, his foundational work in mathematical logic, and an influential theory of signs, or semiotics. Albert Atkin introduces the full spectrum of Peirce’s thought for those coming to his work for the first time. The book begins with an overview of Peirce’s life and work, considering his early and long-standing interest in (...) logic and science, and highlighting important views on the structure of philosophical thought. Atkin then explains Peirce’s accounts of pragmatism and truth examining important later developments to these theories. He then introduces Peirce’s full accounts of semiotics, examines his foundational work on formal and graphical logic, and introduces Peirce’s account of metaphysics, the least understood aspect of his philosophy. The final chapter considers Peirce’s legacy and influence on the thought of philosophers such as John Dewey and Richard Rorty, as well as highlighting areas where Peirce’s ideas could still provide important insights for contemporary philosophers. Including chapter summaries, suggestions for further reading and a glossary, this invaluable introduction and guide to Peirce’s philosophy is essential reading for those new to his work. (shrink)

The debate about direct perception encompasses different topics, one of which concerns the richness of the contents of perceptual experiences. Can we directly perceive only low-level properties, like edges, colors etc., or can we perceive high-level properties and entities as well? The aim of the paper is to defend the claim that the content of our perceptual experience can include emotions and also person impressions. Using these examples, an argument is developed to defend a liberal-content view for core examples of (...) social cognition. This view is developed and contrasted with accounts which claim that in the case of registering another person’s emotion while seeing them, we have to describe the relevant content not as the content of a perceptual experience, but of a perceptual belief. The paper defends the view that perceptual experiences can have a rich content yet remain separable from beliefs formed on the basis of the experience. How liberal and enriched the content of a perceptual experience is will depend upon the expertise a person has developed in the field. This is supported by the argument that perceptual experiences can be systematically enriched by perceiving affordances of objects, by pattern recognition or by top-down processes, as analyzed by processes of cognitive penetration or predictive coding. (shrink)

The literature on ethical decision-making is rooted in a cognitive perspective that emphasizes the role of moral judgment. Recent research in interpersonal dynamics, however, has suggested that ethics revolves around an individual’s perceptions and views of others. We draw from both literatures to propose and empirically examine a contingent model. We theorize that whether the individual relies on cognitions about the ethical issue or perceptions of others depends on the level of social consensus surrounding the issue. We test our hypotheses (...) in three studies. Results suggest that not only does social consensus determine whether an individual relies on ethical cognitions about the issue or perceptions of others, but also that an individual’s view of self is an important moderator in these relationships. We conclude by considering implications of this research for theory and practice. (shrink)

The concept of community of persons, which focuses on both persons and the whole, helps understand solidarity. The latter is based on the social nature of persons. Community of persons and solidarity seems to be able to move away from the individualist perspective or the individualism-collectivism dichotomy. Using autopraxeography in a pragmatic constructivism epistemological paradigm, this article aims to explore how organizations can develop solidarity in a workplace. The experience presented takes place in a bank. It shows that communities of (...) persons with employees and customers are both ethical and financially efficient. These communities build a dialogue between persons and organizations. Nevertheless, it is impossible to force solidarity because it could generate derision that is contrary to the wished goal. Finally, while this model is based on solidarity, it focuses solely on internal solidarity. (shrink)

Corporate transgression is a well-known phenomenon in today's business world. Some corporations are involved in violations of law and moral rules that produce organizational practices and products that take a toll on the public. Social cognitive theory of moral agency provides a conceptual framework for analyzing how otherwise pro-social managers adopt socially injurious corporate practices. This is achieved through selective disengagement of moral self-sanctions from transgressive conduct. This article documents moral disengagement practices in four famous cases of corporate transgressions and (...) discusses some implications for business ethics on how to counteract organizational use of moral disengagement strategies. (shrink)

In this paper we study essential hereditary undecidability. Theories with this property are a convenient tool to prove undecidability of other theories. The paper develops the basic facts concerning essentially hereditary undecidability and provides salient examples, like a construction of essentially hereditarily undecidable theories due to Hanf and an example of a rather natural essentially hereditarily undecidable theory strictly below. We discuss the (non-)interaction of essential hereditary undecidability with recursive boolean isomorphism. We develop a reduction relation essential tolerance, or, in (...) the converse direction, lax interpretability that interacts in a good way with essential hereditary undecidability. We introduce the class of $$\Sigma ^0_1$$ Σ 1 0 -friendly theories and show that $$\Sigma ^0_1$$ Σ 1 0 -friendliness is sufficient but not necessary for essential hereditary undecidability. Finally, we adapt an argument due to Pakhomov, Murwanashyaka and Visser to show that there is no interpretability minimal essentially hereditarily undecidable theory. (shrink)

Ethics consultation, while often a process of negotiation between diverse opinions, sometimes requires deeper moral inquiry. The form of such inquiry is suggested by classical casuistry and its attendant doctrine of probabilism.

A theory T is trustworthy iff, whenever a theory U is interpretable in T, then it is faithfully interpretable. In this paper we give a characterization of trustworthiness. We provide a simple proof of Friedman’s Theorem that finitely axiomatized, sequential, consistent theories are trustworthy. We provide an example of a theory whose schematic predicate logic is complete Π20.

Friesen has presented an articulate and detailed account of the injuries of virtualized education and a convincing brief for the value of education that is face-to-face and engaged with tangible reality.

In recent years empiricism has come under attack. Some argue that the view is incoherent and conclude, on that basis, that some knowledge is a priori. Whatever the merits of such arguments against empiricism, they cannot be parlayed into an argument in support of the a priori unless the latter is not open to those arguments. My primary contention is that the a priori is open to the arguments offered against empiricism. Hence, they do not advance the case for the (...) a priori. I go on to offer an alternative strategy. The leading idea is that, instead of arguing against empiricism, rationalists should marshal empirical support for their position. (shrink)

In this paper we study the idea of theories with containers, like sets, pairs, sequences. We provide a modest framework to study such theories. We prove two concrete results. First, we show that first-order theories of finite signature that have functional non-surjective ordered pairing are definitionally equivalent to extensions in the same language of the basic theory of non-surjective ordered pairing. Second, we show that a first-order theory of finite signature is sequential (is a theory of sequences) iff it is (...) definitionally equivalent to an extension in the same language of a system of weak set theory called WS. (shrink)

A many-worlds interpretation is of quantum mechanics tells us that the linear equations of motion are the true and complete laws for the time-evolution of every physical system and that the usual quantum-mechanical states provide complete descriptions of all possible physical situations. Such an interpretation, however, denies the standard way of understanding quantum-mechanical states. When the pointer on a measuring device is in a superposition of pointing many different directions, for example, we are to understand this as many pointers, each (...) in a differentworld, each pointing in a different determinate direction. We ask here whether such talk makes any genuinely intelligible sense of the term world. We conclude that it does not. (shrink)

IF THE OBJECT OF AN INQUIRY is a constituent of the physical world, such as a physical force or a chemical substance, it is not incumbent on the inquirer to raise the prior question of the basis and nature of inquiry itself. This is as true of the bodily functions of organisms endowed with subjective capacities as it is of the physical world within which the organism finds itself. But this situation no longer holds when the object of inquiry involves (...) the nature of subjectivity itself, and not simply the elements and processes of the spatio-temporal world from which subjects have emerged. Two centuries of research in the physical sciences have led to the conclusion that the physical universe is a process of cosmological and biological evolution which stretches back for billions of years prior to the appearance on this planet of any sort of subject, nonhuman or human. The supposition that an inference of this sort can be "theory-laden" to the point of invalidating the evolutionary inference itself will not be taken seriously here. Exactly how evolution is to be understood is certainly a problem, and is in fact one of the problems with which we are here concerned. But the essential premise, the fundamentally important point, is that organisms capable of subjective experience did emerge in the course of that evolution. It follows that if we are to attempt the analysis of a concept which does not refer simply to the physical world itself but both to that world and to the manner of conceiving it, then it is necessary to begin by situating subjectivity relatively to the evolutionary process. (shrink)

This paper develops the pragmatic “atheoreticism” of Quine and Rorty. A position I dub “postpragmatism”—paralleling the post phases of modernism and humanism—my purpose here is to bring to a culmination what Quine and Rorty started decades before. By doing so, I argue, it becomes possible for Quine, and more so Rorty, to avoid the most common critiques of their atheoretic form of pragmatism. Chief among them, that it is mired in self-contradiction. Rather than rely upon theory to justify atheoreticism—the very (...) stuff of their self-contradiction—I rely instead upon Rorty’s own insouciance, syncretism, and eclecticism to shift the ground of debate from concern with what is justified to concern with what is interesting. (shrink)

The first completely geometric approach to relativity theory, based on the space-time geometries of Loedel and Brehme.

In Meyer’s promising account [7] deontic logic is reduced to a dynamic logic. Meyer claims that with his account “we get rid of most (if not all) of the nasty paradoxes that have plagued traditional deontic logic.” But as was shown by van der Meyden in [4], Meyer’s logic also contains a paradoxical formula. In this paper we will show that another paradox can be proven, one which also effects Meyer’s “solution” to contrary to duty obligations and his logic in (...) general. (shrink)

Why is the average quality of research in open science so high? The answer seems obvious. Science is highly competitive, and publishing high quality research is the way to rise to the top. Thus, researchers face strong incentives to produce high quality work. However, this is only part of the answer. High quality in science, after all, is what researchers in the relevant field consider to be high quality. Why and how do competing researchers coordinate on common quality standards? I (...) argue that, on the methodological level, science is a dynamic beauty contest. (shrink)

Throughout his writings, Hume extols the benefits of an attribute he calls “Strength of Mind,” which he defines as the “prevalence of the calm passions over the violent” (T 2.3.3.10). But there is some question as to how he thought a person could attain this important trait. Contemporary scholars have committed Hume to the view that only indirect and social methods, such as state punishment or sympathetic pressure, could effectively cultivate it. Yet a closer examination of Hume’s corpus reveals a (...) more direct approach applicable at the individual level. Though rarely achieved and difficult to execute, self-government of the passions is possible according to Hume. The key to success lies in harnessing the power of habit. In its most sophisticated form, the process centrally involves cultivating a certain transformative connoisseurship, the ability to appreciate regularities in one’s own mental activity and thereby alter it. (shrink)

Self-knowledge is knowledge of one’s own states (or processes) in an indexical mode of presentation. The philosophical debate is concentrating on mental states (or processes). If we characterize self-knowledge by natural language sentences, the most adequate utterance has a structure like “I know that I am in mental state M”. This common sense characterization has to be developed into an adequate description. In this investigation we will tackle two questions: (i) What precisely is the phenomenon referred to by “self-knowledge” and (...) how can we adequately describe a form of self-knowledge which we might realistically enjoy? (ii) Can we have self-knowledge given the fact that the meaning of some words which we utter depends on the environment or the speech community? The theory we defend argues that we have to distinguish the public meaning of utterances, on the one hand, and the mental representations which are constituting a mental state of an individual, on the other. Self-knowledge should be characterized on the level of mental representations while the semantics of utterances self-attributing mental states should be treated separately. Externalism is only true for the public meaning of utterances but not for beliefs and other mental states including self-knowledge. (shrink)