Mark Textor

This book aims to introduce and assess Hermann Lotze’s (1817–1881) main contributions to philosophy of psychology and mind. Lotze was the most influential philosopher of his time. He revitalized German philosophy after Hegel’s death and inspired American Pragmatists as well as British Idealists. In his work Lotze brought medical research, metaphysics, and psychology together and argued for an approach to psychology in which the soul is central. He defended the soul, the irreducibility of the mental, and the interaction between soul and body. In doing so he proposed views of feeling, attention, self-consciousness, the unity of consciousness. These views were discussed in Lotze’s time but are now unjustly neglected. The book provides a rational reconstruction of these views and their interconnection. It examines in detail Lotze’s affective view of self-consciousness and his view of comparing, the activity in which we attain awareness of relations. The latter fuels an original argument for the existence of the soul and its importance for psychology. This argument is also seen as a refutation of panpsychism, the view that fundamental reality is made of ‘mind-stuff’. The book pays attention throughout to the historical background of Lotze’s thought as well as to discussions of Lotze’s work in American and British philosophy, and thereby sheds light on how his thought shaped American Pragmatism and British Idealism.

For Bolzano, grounding and propositional complexity are connected: simpler and more general truths are supposed to ground more complex and specific truths. How does one measure the complexity of a truth? Bolzano’s answer is: a truth is a whole with parts (‘objective ideas’) and we measure its complexity by counting its parts. But how do we count parts of propositions? Does the proposition _that it is not the case that it is not the case that Socrates is wise_ have five parts or six parts? Plausible assumptions about grounding require that an idea can occur several times in a proposition (‘six’ is the right answer). The repetition problem is the question how one objective can be contained several times in one proposition given that objective ideas are non-spatial and atemporal. The paper argues that this problem can be answered if we take the notion of _a position in a proposition_ seriously.

The notion of acquaintance is one of the pillars of Russell’s philosophy and it remains at the center of work in the philosophy of mind and language. Russell’s development of his theory of acquaintance was influenced by Brentano and Meinong. In this paper I will trace this Austrian Influence on the development of Russell’s theory of acquaintance through two phases; one before and one after Russell introduced the multiple relation theory of judgement in 1907. I will use Brentano’s view of the distinction between judgement and presentation to highlight problems with Russell’s theories of acquaintance in both phases. In doing so I will give special attention to Russell’s notion of experiencing together that plays a foundational role in the second phase. The paper concludes by recommending to Russell that he returns to Brentano’s original ideas about judgement and presentation.

Perception and its puzzles have given rise to philosophical reflection from antiquity to recent times: What do we perceive? How do we talk about what we perceive? What is the nature of our subjective experience? How can we talk about our subjective experience? In this book a distinguished group of philosophers addresses questions like these by drawing on historical and contemporary sources, illuminating the intersections between historical and contemporary philosophical discussion. They ask about the way things look; about how we can perceive a particular object (and no other); about self-perception; and about the nature and explanation of our phenomenal experience, and our talk about it. The book provides important new work in a central philosophical area.

Der zweite Band der Reihe Philosophische Forschung spannt zwei Kerngebiete der Analytischen Philosophie zusammen: die Semantik und die Ontologie. Was sind die Grundbausteine unserer Ontologie? Wie beziehen wir uns sprachlich bzw. geistig auf sie? Diese und weitere Fragen werden von international renommierten Philosophen aus historischer und systematischer Perspektivediskutiert. Die Beiträge sind in Deutsch und English verfasst. Sie stammen von Christian Beyer, Johannes Brandl, Dagfinn Føllesdal, Dorothea Frede, Rolf George, Gerd Graßhoff, Peter Hacker, Andreas Kemmerling, Edgar Morscher, Kevin Mulligan, Rolf Puster, Richard Schantz, Benjamin Schnieder, Oliver Scholz, Severin Schröder, Peter Simons, Thomas Spitzley, Markus Stepanians, Ralf Stoecker und Daniel von Wachter.

Hector‐Neri Castaüeda claimed in several papers that a proposition expressed by an indexical sentence (in a context of utterance) can be re‐expressed by means of an oratio obliqua clause (in a sentential context) that contains a quasi‐indicator. Robert M. Adams and Rogers Albritton have presented a counter‐argument that is accepted by Castaüeda himself. I will argue that the Adams/albritton argument is not convincing: The argument uses several assumptions which could be disputed. The paper tries to develop a more direct argument against Castaüeda's central claim. If Castaüeda's thesis is false, what then is achieved by quasi‐indexicals in oratio ubliqua? Adams and Castaüeda answer this question with a picture: the quasi‐indexical clause portrays an indexical proposition. I use Perry's idea that quasi‐indicators could be seen as expressions that bind special sense variables to give a less metaphorical account of the functioning of quasi‐indicators. Finally. I explore the consequences of this account for iterated knowledge‐ascriptions with quasi‐indicators and for truth‐conditional theories of meaning.