Philosophie in der Welt und für die Welt – Realitätsbezüge einer Disziplin zweiter Ordnung

According to a widely accepted conception, philosophy is essentially a second-order discipline raising second-order questions about the procedures and products of first-order reasonings (concepts; principles; theories etc.). While this conception has considerable prima facie plausibility and, carefully put, contains a grain of truth, it also invites serious misunderstandings that may be detrimental to an adequate understanding and public image of philosophy. To work out the grain of truth while avoiding the misunderstandings, I begin by asking: What is philosophical understanding? In answering this question, understanding in philosophy is compared and contrasted with everyday understanding, on the one hand, and scientific understanding, on the other hand. While philosophy itself is a scientific practice in a wide sense, in contrast to normal understanding within a special scientific discipline (physics; chemistry; biology; psychology; etc.) philosophical understanding is characterized by a particular critical attitude and particular principles of rational acceptability.

Johann Gottlieb Fichtes Auseinandersetzung mit der Idee einer induktiven Metaphysik im ersten Buch von Die Bestimmung des Menschen

This paper reconstructs the first book of Fichte’s Die Bestimmung des Menschen as an implicit critique by Fichte of the idea of an inductive metaphysics, an idea that was developed explicitly by some philosophers in the German-speaking world only in the second half of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. It becomes clear which basic premises of Fichte’s philosophy are responsible for the rejection of the idea of an inductive metaphysics. In particular, the idea of an inductive metaphysics cannot be reconciled with Fichte’s strong claim of certainty. This claim was abandoned by the proponents of inductive metaphysics in the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, allowing the idea of an inductive metaphysics to become a serious candidate for approaching metaphysics. The analysis of Fichte’s text also shows that it is crucial for inductive metaphysics to work out a measure of the ranking of rival explanatory hypotheses so that a rational decision between competing metaphysical theories based on inferences to the best explanation becomes possible.

Von der Möglichkeit des moralischen Subjektivismus. Eine Untersuchung zum Einstellungscharakter von Moral und Religion

Moral subjectivism is commonly associated with out-of-favour theories like, e.g., Alfred Ayer’s emotivism or John Mackie’s error theory. This paper approaches the field against the background of the attitudinal character of morality and religion. The possibility of a brand of moral subjectivism is established which is common to Ayer’s and Mackie’s theories in name only but seems to have considerable merits. The perspective from action theory and the philosophy of mind suggests that the problem of moral obligation, central to moral philosophy, is more convincingly dealt with by subjectivism than by its rivals: In contrast to realism or even relativism (with which subjectivism often gets confused), subjectivism can help to explain the peculiarities of obligation without forcing us to disregard the parallel problem in the field of religion. This finding calls into question the rationale for, as well as the success of, central assumptions in ontology and semantics which the realist so freely hands out in order to make his point: If religious facts and the truth-aptness of religious judgements will not explain religious obligation, moral facts and the truth-aptness of moral judgements will not help the moral realist either. So, unless we do not wish to simply cast the problem of moral obligation aside, in future, moral subjectivism must be seriously considered as a worthwhile position in its own right.

Selfdetermination in philosophy and factical life. Some considerations about an early Heidegger lecture

The main focus of this article is the methodological problem of the selfdetermination of the philosophy according to the phenomenological analysis carried out by Heidegger in one of the lectures of his early period (the so called Früh Freiburger Vorlesungen). The general frame of the current paper implies a hermeneutical thesis according to which the relevance of the well-known “factical life” is not solely thematic but mainly methodological. This function explains why these “phenomenological exercises” are some sort of genetical enquiries. In consequence, the specific aim of this article is, on the one hand, to show that the problem of the selfdetermination of the philosophy is the document of the more basic problem of the possibility of access to the intentional structures as such. On the other hand, this implies that the facticity as the primary horizon of comprehension constitutes in deed a redrawing of the intentional structure, in such a way that it is avoided the paradoxical consequences of the reflexive-intuitive model of access to one self and makes a relevant issue to the philosophy the problematic character of the intentionality itself.

Use and misuse of neuroscience in the philosophy of religion

The article elucidates in what way neuroscience and in particular neuroimaging can contribute to the clarification and empirical underpinning of theories in the philosophy of mind and the anthropology of religion. Its initial hypothesis is that there are two principal ways in which neuroscientific data are relevant to philosophy, exhibiting the unconscious processes in the generation of phenomenal and intentional consciousness, and complementing semantic and phenomenological approaches in the analysis of complex mental phenomena. Whereas the first kind of relevance is widely recognised, contributions of neuroscientific data to the analysis of complex mental phenomena are often rejected as involving a kind of "category mistake." The article argues that imaging studies can in fact contribute to a better understanding of the nature of certain complex mental states and processes and exemplifies this by recent brain imaging studies on religious experience. Finally, theories like those of Andrew Newberg are taken to task for misrepresenting "neurotheology" as a new form of theology.

Der performative Selbstwiderspruch jeder propositionalen Offenbarung

Is there a propositional revelation, and if so, are there rational criteria by which one can distinguish a true revelation from one that only pretends to be one? In the first section of this essay, I will analyze the basic concepts of "revelation" and "knowledge" associated with the topic under discussion. In the second section, I will name epistemological objections that result from these analyses for propositional revelation: firstly, problems of criteria of first and second order revelation, and secondly, the performative self-contradiction of the condition of transcendence contained in the definition of propositional revelation. Finally, in the third section I draw fundamental epistemological consequences from the previous considerations.