Various theories try to give accounts of how measures of this confidence do or ought to behave, both as far as the internal mental consistency of the agent as ...

This book contains the definitive statement of Franz Brentano's views on meta physics. It is made up of essays which were dictated by Brentano during the last ten years of his life, between 1907 and 1917. These dictations were assembled and edited by Alfred Kastil and first published by the Felix Meiner Verlag in 1933 under the title Kategorienlehre. Kastil added copious notes to Brentano's text. These notes have been included, with some slight omissions, in the present edition; the (...) bibliographical references have been brought up to date. Brentano's approach to philosophy is unfamiliar to many contemporay readers. I shall discuss below certain fundamental points which such readers are likely to find the most difficult. I believe that once these points are properly understood, then what Brentano has to say will be seen to be of first importance to philosophy. THE PRIMACY OF THE INTENTIONAL To understand Brentano's theory of being, one must realize that he appeals to what he calls inner perception for his paradigmatic uses of the word "is". For inner perception, according to Brentano, is the source of our knowledge of the nature of being, just as it is the source of our knowledge of the nature of truth and of the nature of good and evil. And what can be said about the being of things that are not apprehended in inner perception can be understood only by analogy with what we are able to say about ourselves as thinking subjects. (shrink)

Introduction and translation of “The Four Phases of Philosophy” by Franz Brentano.

Abstract Proportional quantifiers have played a central role in the development of formal semantics because they set a benchmark for the expressive power needed to describe quantification in natural language (Barwise and Cooper Linguist Philos 4:159–219, 1981). The proportional quantifier most, in particular, supplied the initial motivation for adopting Generalized Quantifier Theory (GQT) because its meaning is definable as a relation between sets of individuals, which are taken to be semantic primitives in GQT. This paper proposes an alternative analysis of (...) most that does not treat it as a lexical item whose meaning is accessible without the help of compositional processes. Instead, proportional most is analyzed as the superlative of many (cf. Bresnan Linguist Inq 4(3):274–344, 1973). Two types of empirical evidence are presented in support of this view, both exploiting the fact that only a decompositional analysis of proportional quantifiers provides the means to generate different logical forms for seemingly equivalent statements of the form most A B and more than half of the A B. (shrink)

The notion of measurement plays a central role in human cognition. We measure people’s height, the weight of physical objects, the length of stretches of time, or the size of various collections of individuals. Measurements of height, weight, and the like are commonly thought of as mappings between objects and dense scales, while measurements of collections of individuals, as implemented for instance in counting, are assumed to involve discrete scales. It is also commonly assumed that natural language makes use of (...) both types of scales and subsequently distinguishes between two types of measurements. This paper argues against the latter assumption. It argues that natural language semantics treats all measurements uniformly as mappings from objects (individuals or collections of individuals) to dense scales, hence the Universal Density of Measurement (UDM). If the arguments are successful, there are a variety of consequences for semantics and pragmatics, and more generally for the place of the linguistic system within an overall architecture of cognition. (shrink)

In the study of natural language quantification, much recent attention has been devoted to the investigation of verification procedures associated with the proportional quantifier most. The aim of these studies is to go beyond the traditional characterization of the semantics of most, which is confined to explicating its truth-functional and presuppositional content as well as its combinatorial properties, as these aspects underdetermine the correct analysis of most. The present paper contributes to this effort by presenting new experimental evidence in support (...) of a decompositional analysis of most according to which it is a superlative construction built from a gradable predicate many or much and the superlative operator -est. Our evidence comes in the form of verification profiles for sentences like Most of the dots are blue which, we argue, reflect the existence of a superlative reading of most. This notably contrasts with Lidz et al.’s results. To reconcile the two sets of data, we argue, it is necessary to take important differences in task demands into account, which impose limits on the conclusions that can be drawn from these studies. (shrink)

In dem Sammelband, der als Festschrift zum 65. Geburtstag von Franz Hundsnurscher erscheint, sind 47 Beiträge zu zwei thematischen Schwerpunkten versammelt, die im Werk Hundsnurschers von zentraler Bedeutung sind: Semantik und Dialoganalyse. Im ersten Teil werden neben grundlegenden Fragen der Semantik Aspekte der semantischen Beschreibung von Phraseologismen, des Fremdwortgebrauchs und des Grundwortschatzes diskutiert; neben synchronen (meist gebrauchstheoretischen) Untersuchungen zu Einzelwörtern und Quasisynonymengruppen im Deutschen stehen sprachhistorische und kontrastive Arbeiten. Vor allem mit theoretischen und methodologischen Fragen der Dialoganalyse, mit Fragen (...) der Analyse institutioneller Kommunikation (Politik, Recht, Wirtschaft) und literarischer Dialoge setzen sich die Beiträge des zweiten Teils auseinander. (shrink)

In "Knowledge Triumphant," Franz Rosenthal observes that the Islamic civilization is one that is essentially characterized by knowledge ("'ilm"), for "ilm is ...

Der Autor legt hier die erste Gesamtdarstellung der antiken Ansätze zu einer vergleichenden Zeichentheorie der Künste (Poesie, Plastik, Malerei, Musik, aber auch darstellendes Verhalten in der Lebenspraxis) vor, die für die Herausbildung und Entwicklung der griechischen Ästhetik, Literatur- und Kunsttheorie konstitutiv waren. Von Simonides über Empedokles, Gorgias, Platon und Aristoteles bis zur Stoa (von Chrysipp bis Poseidonios) und zu den Epikureern (von Epikur bis zu Philodem) werden alle wichtigen Positionen und Debattenlinien zwischen Spätarchaik und Späthellenismus behandelt, eingebettet in eine breit (...) angelegte Analyse des semiotischen Feldes (Zeichen in Medizin, Rhetorik, Geschichtsschreibung, Logik, Epistemologie, Physik und anderen Wissenschaften). Die poetologisch, kunsttheoretisch und musikologisch relevanten Probleme einer vergleichenden Zeichentheorie werden in konkreten Literatur- und Kunstanalysen am Material entwickelt (Euripides, hellenistische Plastik, Philodems Epigramme, Lukrez' De Rerum Natura). (shrink)

"Today, more than three-quarters of a century after it was written, the critique of philosophy in this book is what makes it of such great interest.

Public reason as a political ideal aims to reconcile reasonable disagreement; however, is public reason itself the object of reasonable disagreement? Jonathan Quong, David Estlund, Andrew Lister, and some other philosophers maintain that public reason is beyond reasonable disagreement. I argue this view is untenable. In addition, I consider briefly whether or not two main versions of the public reason principle, namely, the consensus version and the convergence version, need to satisfy their own requirements. My discussion has several important implications (...) for the debate on public reason. (shrink)

A philosophic critique of the development of postmodern systemic values, including an interpretation of freedom through Locke, Marx and Nietzsche; the impact of globalization on human rights and the contemporary enthronement of profit over human needs.

ZU "HEGEL UND DER STAAT" Der erste, der das Leben Hegels schrieb, war der Konigsberger Professor Karl Rosenkranz. Sein Buch erschien 1844. Der Verfasser hatte Hegel noch seIber gekannt. Unter den person lichen treuge­ bliebenen Schiilern ist er einer der freieren; ohne daB er seinen Anschauungen nach gerade der Hegelschen Linken zuzurechnen ware, ist ihm doch manches mit ihr gemein; nicht bloB eine gewisse Selbstandigkeit gegeniiber der Systematik des Meisters, sondern mehr noch eine eigentiimliche Zersplitterung und Beweglichkeit des Empfindens, ein (...) unruhig stoffsiichtiges Hineingreifen in die Schatze der Zeit und Vergangenheit, ein starker Hang endlich zum geist­ reichen Widersinn stell en den Verfasser der "Asthetik des HaBlichen" fast eher in die Reihe der StrauB, Bauer, Feuerbach als zu den Marheineke, Gabler und Henning. Sein Hegelbuch zeigt von diesen Eigenschaften verhaltnismaBig wenig; sie sind da zuriickge­ drangt durch die fromme Achtung des Schiilers gegen den toten Meister und wohl auch durch den Ernst des BewuBtseins, sozusagen im amtlichen Auf trag der Schule zu schreiben: die Lebensgeschichte trat an die Offentlichkeit als Erganzungsband zu den Werken. Auch die Menge handschriftlichen Stoffes, die das Buch im Abdruck oder Auszug brachte, tat das ihre, dem Verfasser den Ratim fiir seine eigenen Fliige einzuengen. Immerhin wird der Leser des noch heute unentbehrlichen und urn seiner ausgepragten und zeitcharakteristi­ schen Eigenart willen wohl nie ganz iiberftiissig zu machenden Buchs noch genug wunderbare Einfalle darin finden. (shrink)

This squib presents two puzzles related to an ambiguity found in for-infinitival relative clauses (FIRs). FIRs invariably receive a modal interpretation even in the absence of any overt modal verb. The modal interpretation seems to come in two distinct types, which can be paraphrased by finite relative clauses employing the modal auxiliaries should and could. The two puzzles presented here arise because the availability of the two readings is constrained by factors that are not otherwise known to affect the interpretation (...) of a relative clause. Specifically, we show, first, that “strong” determiners require the FIR to be interpreted as a SHOULD-relative while “weak” determiners allow both interpretations (the Determiner-Modal Generalization). Secondly, we observe that the COULD-interpretation requires a raising (internally headed) structure for the FIR, while the SHOULD-interpretation is compatible with either a raising or a more standard matching (externally headed) structure (the Raising/Matching Generalization). (shrink)

This squib presents two puzzles related to an ambiguity found in for-infinitival relative clauses (FIRs). FIRs invariably receive a modal interpretation even in the absence of any overt modal verb. The modal interpretation seems to come in two distinct types, which can be paraphrased by finite relative clauses employing the modal auxiliaries should and could. The two puzzles presented here arise because the availability of the two readings is constrained by factors that are not otherwise known to affect the interpretation (...) of a relative clause. Specifically, we show, first, that “strong” determiners require the FIR to be interpreted as a SHOULD-relative while “weak” determiners allow both interpretations (the Determiner-Modal Generalization). Secondly, we observe that the COULD-interpretation requires a raising (internally headed) structure for the FIR, while the SHOULD-interpretation is compatible with either a raising or a more standard matching (externally headed) structure (the Raising/Matching Generalization). (shrink)

Group decisions must often obey exogenous constraints. While in a preference aggregation problem constraints are modelled by restricting the set of feasible alternatives, this paper discusses the modelling of constraints when aggregating individual yes/no judgments on interconnected propositions. For example, court judgments in breach-of-contract cases should respect the constraint that action and obligation are necessary and sufficient for liability, and judgments on budget items should respect budgetary constraints. In this paper, we make constraints in judgment aggregation explicit by relativizing the (...) rationality conditions of consistency and deductive closure to a constraint set, whose variation yields more or less strong notions of rationality. This approach of modelling constraints explicitly contrasts with that of building constraints as axioms into the logic, which turns compliance with constraints into a matter of logical consistency and thereby conflates requirements of ordinary logical consistency and requirements dictated by the environment . We present some general impossibility results on constrained judgment aggregation; they are immediate corollaries of known results on judgment aggregation. (shrink)

(Winner of The Res Publica Essay Prize) This article defends a moderate version of state perfectionism by using Gerald Gaus’s argument for liberal neutrality as a starting point of discussion. Many liberal neutralists reject perfectionism on the grounds of respect for persons, but Gaus has explained more clearly than most neutralists how respect for persons justifies neutrality. Against neutralists, I first argue that the state may promote the good life by appealing to what can be called “the qualified judgments about (...) the good life,” which have not been considered by liberal perfectionists including Joseph Chan and Steven Wall. Then I clear up several possible misunderstandings of these judgments, and argue that: (a) moderate perfectionism does not rely on controversial rankings of values and is committed to promoting different valuable ways of life by pluralistic promotion; and (b) moderate perfectionism requires only an indirect form of coercion in using tax money to support certain moderate perfectionist measures, which is justifiable on the grounds of citizens’ welfare. Thus, I maintain that moderate perfectionism does not disrespect citizens, and is not necessarily unfair to any particular group of people. It is, in fact, plausible and morally important. The defence of moderate perfectionism has practical implications for the state’s policies regarding art development, drug abuse, public education, and so on. (shrink)

Das Buch behandelt die Ästhetik der tonalen Musik. Analysiert werden Klangformen wie Konsonanz, Dissonanz, Tonalität, Takt, Kontrapunkt oder Motiv. Dabei zeigt sich: Alle harmonischen, rhythmischen und melodischen Klanggestalten sind ihrem Wesen nach Verhältnisse des klanglichen Zusammenpassens. Als solche sind sie systematisch aufeinander aufgebaut und bilden ein Ensemble aus acht ästhetischen Prinzipien, denen jeweils ein Kapitel dieses Buches gewidmet ist. In der logischen Abfolge dieser Kapitel wird der innere Zusammenhang von Harmonie, Rhythmus und Melodie offen gelegt. Die Suche nach einer "Bedeutung" (...) der musikalischen Formen ist nicht die Sache dieses Buches. Dann schon eher die schonungslose Kritik der theoretischen Absurditäten, die sich aus jener musikwissenschaftlichen Unsitte ergeben. (shrink)

Avec Walter Benjamin, Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) est sans conteste l'une des figures les plus originales de la pensée allemande du début du XXe siècle. Les effets de ses œuvres ont été immédiatement sensibles dans toutes les orientations du judaïsme allemand, au cours même de l'identité allemande lorsqu'avec Martin Buber il donna une nouvelle traduction de la Bible, et, plus généralement, dans la philosophie qui voulait, comme la pensée de Heidegger, rompre avec l'idéalisme, la tradition métaphysique ou avec les illusions (...) du positivisme d'avant-guerre ; mais c'est surtout dans la controverse avec le christianisme que se précise peu à peu une nouvelle conception de l'existence juive, une nouvelle perspective messianique. La genèse de son livre majeur, L'Étoile de la Rédemption, est, elle aussi, peu commune puisque Rosenzweig l'a d'abord ébauché, dans les tranchées où il était mobilisé, à travers des conversations, des correspondances - en situation de dialogue donc -, puis l'a poursuivi en en rédigeant une partie sur des cartes postales adressées à sa mère. Le présent recueil rassemble ces textes préparatoires de même qu'une sorte de longue postface explicative, des cours qu'il donna dans le nouvel institut d'enseignement qu'il avait fondé à Francfort, ainsi que des extraits du journal de l'auteur. Autant d'éclairages qui permettent de mieux comprendre L Étoile de la Rédemption, ses présupposés comme ses points de fuite, et qui esquissent les perspectives politiques, esthétiques et philosophiques dont un second volume se fera plus précisément l'écho. (shrink)

Anhand des absoluten Idealismus der Mitwissenschaft formuliert Michael Hackl einen Freiheitsbegriff, der lehrt, welche Verantwortung wir gegenuber Natur und Geist haben. Ohne die Freiheit des Willens ist keine Moral und keine Ethik moglich. Sind wir nicht zum selbstbestimmten Handeln fahig, handeln wir, wie wir handeln, ohne dass wir daran etwas andern konnten. Sodann ist kein moralisches Handeln moglich, schliesslich konnen wir nicht sollen, wir sind schlechthin fremdbestimmt, sohin ohnmachtig. Sofern wir aber zur freien Tat fahig sind, hat sie hochste (...) Geltung fur unser Handeln, durch sie konnen wir das Gute und Schone in der Welt hervorbringen. Haben wir Freiheit, ist sie fur uns der hochste Wert, treten wir nicht fur sie ein, ist sie nicht mehr."-- Back cover. (shrink)

Group decisions must often obey exogenous constraints. While in a preference aggregation problem constraints are modelled by restricting the set of feasible alternatives, this paper discusses the modelling of constraints when aggregating individual yes/no judgments on interconnected propositions. For example, court judgments in breach-of-contract cases should respect the constraint that action and obligation are necessary and sufficient for liability, and judgments on budget items should respect budgetary constraints. In this paper, we make constraints in judgment aggregation explicit by relativizing the (...) rationality conditions of consistency and deductive closure to a constraint set, whose variation yields more or less strong notions of rationality. This approach of modelling constraints explicitly contrasts with that of building constraints as axioms into the logic, which turns compliance with constraints into a matter of logical consistency and thereby conflates requirements of ordinary logical consistency (such as not to affirm both a proposition and its negation) and requirements dictated by the environment (such as budgetary constraints). We present some general impossibility results on constrained judgment aggregation; they are immediate corollaries of known results on (unconstrained) judgment aggregation. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung Eine Anzahl babylonischer Texte archivalischen, astronomischen und anderen Charakters zeigt, dass der als Arses bekannte Achämenidenherrscher den Thronnamen Artaxerxes führte. Die babylonischen Quellen fügen sich damit in das bereits aus anderen Quellen bekannte Bild ein – darunter die Trilingue von Xanthos. Im Beitrag werden Kriterien dargelegt, die eine Zuordnung babylonischer Texte zu Artaxerxes IV. ermöglichen.

Zusammenfassung Der Artikel bietet die Bearbeitung eines bislang unveröffentlichten Keilschrifttextes (LB 863) aus der Liagre Böhl Collection (Leiden), der weiterführende Aussagen zur Dauer der Koregentschaft von Seleukos I. Nikator und Antiochos (I. Soter) erlaubt. Aufgrund des darin genannten Datums lässt sich wahrscheinlich machen, dass Antiochos’ Erhebung zum Koregenten wenigstens zwei Jahre früher anzusetzen ist als allgemein angenommen. Im Übrigen ist diese Beobachtung gut mit einem anderen Keilschrifttext (D.T. 189) vereinbar, dessen ungewöhnliches Datum sich bislang einer befriedigenden Erklärung entzogen hat.

Behaviourism is the view that preferences, beliefs, and other mental states in social-scientific theories are nothing but constructs re-describing people's behaviour. Mentalism is the view that they capture real phenomena, on a par with the unobservables in science, such as electrons and electromagnetic fields. While behaviourism has gone out of fashion in psychology, it remains influential in economics, especially in ‘revealed preference’ theory. We defend mentalism in economics, construed as a positive science, and show that it fits best scientific practice. (...) We distinguish mentalism from, and reject, the radical neuroeconomic view that behaviour should be explained in terms of brain processes, as distinct from mental states. (shrink)

Pets are truly great companions. Some individuals feel that owning a pet can help them prepare for a growing family by giving them a taste of what it would be like to have children. This study also looks into the psychological well-being and life experiences of LGBT fur parents. Employing the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, the findings of this study were: (1) With the presence of fur babies, participants had the ease to overcome stressful events, especially the ones that affect their (...) mental health. With these, they have the desire to take care of their fur babies under all circumstances because they see their fur babies as family members. Fur babies are excellent sources of motivation, confidence, and happiness for fur parents. They are treated as family members because they contribute to the mental and emotional aspects of fur parents. Moreover, the majority of respondents valued their pets far more than their actual family members, however, some didn't spend as much time with their relatives and friends. This study comes to the conclusion that a stronger bond with one's dog was also linked to higher anxiety about being unloved and rejected by family members and people surrounding us, which was linked to a heavier impact on one's psychological well-being. In reality, fur parents, especially LGBT parents, offer their fur babies a lot of love and attention compared to other things. (shrink)

Agents are often assumed to have degrees of belief (“credences”) and also binary beliefs (“beliefs simpliciter”). How are these related to each other? A much-discussed answer asserts that it is rational to believe a proposition if and only if one has a high enough degree of belief in it. But this answer runs into the “lottery paradox”: the set of believed propositions may violate the key rationality conditions of consistency and deductive closure. In earlier work, we showed that this problem (...) generalizes: there exists no local function from degrees of belief to binary beliefs that satisfies some minimal conditions of rationality and non-triviality. “Locality” means that the binary belief in each proposition depends only on the degree of belief in that proposition, not on the degrees of belief in others. One might think that the impossibility can be avoided by dropping the assumption that binary beliefs are a function of degrees of belief. We prove that, even if we drop the “functionality” restriction, there still exists no local relation between degrees of belief and binary beliefs that satisfies some minimal conditions. Thus functionality is not the source of the impossibility; its source is the condition of locality. If there is any non-trivial relation between degrees of belief and binary beliefs at all, it must be a “holistic” one. We explore several concrete forms this “holistic” relation could take. (shrink)

We introduce a “reason-based” framework for explaining and predicting individual choices. It captures the idea that a decision-maker focuses on some but not all properties of the options and chooses an option whose motivationally salient properties he/she most prefers. Reason-based explanations allow us to distinguish between two kinds of context-dependent choice: the motivationally salient properties may (i) vary across choice contexts, and (ii) include not only “intrinsic” properties of the options, but also “context-related” properties. Our framework can accommodate boundedly rational (...) and sophisticatedly rational choice. Since properties can be recombined in new ways, it also offers resources for predicting choices in unobserved contexts. (shrink)