Mark Textor

The philosopher and psychologist Hermann Lotze (1817-1881) developed an original view of self-consciousness. He opposed Kant’s and Fichte’s treatments of self-consciousness as a purely epistemic phenomenon. According to Lotze, self-consciousness constitutively involves feeling. This paper will provide a reconstruction of Lotze’s under-researched affective theory of self-consciousness and address its main problems. I will argue that the modified Lotzean view is superior to purely epistemic views of self-consciousness and connect Lotze’s view to recent work on mental disorder, especially depersonalisation.

Although an important part of the origins of analytic philosophy can be traced back to philosophy in Austria in the first part of the twentieth century, remarkably little is known about the specific contribution made by Austrian philosophy and philosophers. In _The Austrian Contribution to Analytic Philosophy_, prominent analytic philosophers take a fresh look at the roots of analytic philosophy in the thought of influential but often overlooked Austrian philosophers including Brentano, Meinong, Bolzano, Husserl, and Witasek. The contributors to this volume investigate central topics in theoretical philosophy such as intentionality, consciousness, memory, attributes, and truth as well as political philosophy and aesthetics. This original collection will be of interest to anyone studying the origins of analytic philosophy as well as contemporary debates in philosophy of language, metaphysics and mind.

Gottlob Frege (1848-1925) is considered the father of modern logic and one of the founding figures of analytic philosophy. He was first and foremost a mathematician, but his major works also made important contributions to the philosophy of language. Frege’s writings are difficult and deal with technical, abstract concepts. The _Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Frege On Sense and Reference_ helps the student to get to grips with Frege’s thought, and introduces and assesses: the background of Frege’s philosophical work Frege’s main papers and arguments, focussing on his distinction between sense and reference the continuing importance of Frege’s work to philosophy of logic and language. Ideal for those coming to Frege for the first time, and containing fresh insights for anyone interested in his philosophy, this _Guidebook _is essential reading for all students of philosophy of language, philosophical logic and the history of analytic philosophy.

Nineteenth century treatments of attention often argued that analysis (attention singles out an object) and synthesis (attention unifies some objects) are inseparable aspects of this activity. Subsequent philosophical work on attention concentrated on the analytic aspect and exploited William James's characterisation of attention as focussing on one object among others. The aim of this paper is to give a more balanced account of the history of philosophical work on attention as well as the activity theorised by highlighting the synthetic aspect of attention. The paper is centred on Hermann Lotze's (1817–1881) work on attention. According to him, attention is constituted by comparing. I will motivate Lotze's main thesis and expound his supporting argument in detail by locating it in his work on vision. The paper will draw on George Dawes Hicks engagement with Lotze and assess Francis H. Bradley's criticism of Lotze's main thesis.

The view that moods are dispositions has recently fallen into disrepute. In this paper, we want to revitalise it by providing a new argument for it and by disarming an important objection against it. A shared assumption of our competitors (intentionalists about moods) is that moods are ‘diffuse’. First, we will provide reasons for thinking that existing intentionalist views do not in fact capture this distinctive feature of moods that distinguishes them from emotions. Second, we offer a dispositionalist alternative that we think does better. Finally, we disarm the objection that is responsible for dispositionalism’s bad press.

Welche Bedeutung haben Eigennamen wie "Kurt Gödel", Artnamen wie "Tiger" oder Indexikalia wie "ich"? Auf welche Weise beziehen sich solche Ausdrücke auf etwas? In den letzten Jahren hat sich eine intensive Diskussion über diese Fragen entwickelt, die nicht nur für Sprachphilosophen von Interesse ist: Die in der Debatte vorgebrachten Argumente haben z. B. zu heteodoxen erkenntnistheoretischen Positionen und zu einer Erneuerung des philosophischen Interesses an essentiellen Eigenschaften geführt. In diesem Band sind Arbeiten - größtenteils erstmals in deutscher Übersetzung - zusammengestellt, die den Grundgedanken der Neuen Theorien entwickeln und einzelne Folgeprobleme für diese Neuen Theorien zu lösen versuchen.

Hermann Lotze argued that the fact that consciousness simultaneously “holds objects together as well as apart” such that they can be compared implies (a) that there is a simple thinker and (b) that consciousness is an ‘indivisible unity.’ I offer a reconstruction and evaluation of Lotze’s Argument from Comparison. I contend that it does not deliver (a) but makes a good case for (b). I will relate Lotze’s argument to the contemporary debate between “top-down” and “bottom-up” views of the unity of consciousness and locate it in its historical context. (Kant and Herbart figure prominently here.)

This article offers a reconstruction of Brentano’s notion of act content that identifies the content of a mental act with a combination of marks (Merkmale) or a single such mark. The author will first clarify the role act content plays in Brentano’s philosophy of psychology and then go on to locate the proposed notion of content in the historical context of Brentano’s work as well as in his writings at the time of Psychologie. The author will defend this notion against potential objections and explore its explanatory potential.

The distinction between literal and figurative use is well-known and embedded in ‘folk linguistics’. According to folk linguistics, figurative uses deviate from literal ones. But recent work on lexical modulation and polysemy shows that meaning deviation is ubiquitous, even in cases of literal use. Hence, it has been argued, the literal/figurative distinction has no value for theorising about communication. In this paper, we focus on metaphor and argue that here the literal–figurative distinction has theoretical importance. The distinction between literal and metaphorical needs to be captured by our account of communication because literal uses transmit information in a way that metaphorical ones do not. We argue that there is a way to explain the literal/metaphorical distinction that preserves the core of the folk-linguistic idea and gives the distinction theoretical relevance. We propose that literal uses of a word are made with the intention to conform to an established practice of use, while metaphorical uses do not so conform, but depend on this pre-existing practice. Our account can deal with data that are problematic for other theories. A further advantage is that it extends naturally to other non-literal uses of words, including metonymy.

The nineteenth century saw the development of reductive views of attention. The German philosopher and psychologist Carl Stumpf (1848-1936) proposed an original reductive view according to which attention is nothing but interest and interest itself is a positive feeling. Stumpf’s view was developed by Francis Bradley (1846-1924), George Frederick Stout (1860-1944), and Josiah Royce (1855-1916), but has been overlooked in the recent literature. In this paper, I will expound Stumpf’s view of attention, trace it back to its Aristotelian roots and defend the version offered by Stout and Royce. In this version a new kind of feeling, feelings of interest, and value, intellectual value, take centre stage.

This chapter introduces the reader to Carl Stumpf’s philosophy through a discussion of a problem about simultaneous perception of several objects. This problem is at the heart of several of his works and therefore well suited. Stumpf’s books On the Psychological Origin of the Idea of Space and Tonpsychologie are obviously on different topics, yet in both one and the same problem is central. Space is something in which objects are located, they occupy volumes of it, and are related by relations like in front/behind, left-right, on top of etc. Stumpf applied Aristotle’s idea that there are common sensibles to the debate between empiricism and nativism. Empiricists had set aside the possibility that one can perceive spatial and qualitative properties like colour together. The chapter proposes to take sensory wholes to be a special case of the more general phenomenon that things, in order for us to see (hear) them, must look (sound) to us a certain way.

Philosophers have long tried to articulate the specific epistemic status of judgements that neither need nor admit of justification by drawing on the metaphor of ‘the light of truth’. In contrast, in Brentano's account of intuitive judgement correctness is central: intuitive or immediately evident judgements are ‘characterized as correct (right)’. The aim of my paper is to introduce and explore Brentano’s correctness-based view. I will conclude by relating it to the work of his students Meinong, Stumpf, and Husserl, who gradually eroded Brentano’s insights.

ABSTRACT Recently, the content/force distinction has had a bad press. It has been argued that the distinction is not properly motivated and that it makes the problem of the unity of the proposition intractable. I will argue that Frege’s version of the content/force distinction is immune from these objections. In order to do so, I will reconstruct his argument that ‘the nature of a question’ requires a distinction between force and content. I will answer the concern about the unity of the proposition by outlining how the distinction can be combined with a Fregean account of the unity of thought.

The father of neutral monism, Ernst Mach, argued that the fundamental constituents of the world are neither mental nor physical and that the distinction between the mental and physical ought to be erased. This article offers a reconstruction of Mach’s view. There is a “pure drive for knowledge” (reiner Erkenntnistrieb), and satisfying it, Mach argues, requires abandoning the mental/physical distinction. The reconstruction given will help to articulate and assess the differences between Mach’s position and Russell’s neutral monism, in which the distinction between the mental and physical is preserved even in the unified science of the future.