Gereon Wolters

This paper primarily examines the biography of Hans Jonas from the perspectives of identity and “othering”. Originally a sociological concept associated with a person’s or group’s identity, it has more recently become a central concept in philosophy as well. The paper investigates Jonas’s national identity, in relation to corresponding processes of othering, as well as his linguistic identity. Despite the profound traumas he endured – most notably the Shoah, which claimed his mother’s life – Jonas maintained his German linguistic identity. Perhaps this was also the decisive reason why he decided to bequeath his scholarly estate to the Philosophical Archive at the University of Konstanz.

The act of interpretation occurs in nearly every area of the arts and sciences. That ubiquity serves as the inspiration for the fourteen essays of this volume, covering many of the domains in which interpretive practices are found. Individual topics include: the general nature of interpretation and its forms; comparing and contrasting interpretation and hermeneutics; culture as interpretation seen through Hegel’s aesthetics; interpreting philosophical texts; methodologies for interpreting human action; interpretation in medical practice focusing on manifestations as indicators of disease; the brain and its interpretative, structured, learning and storage processes; interpreting hybrid wines and cognitive preconceptions of novel objects; and the importance of sensory perception as means of interpreting in the case of dry German Rieslings. In an interesting turn, Nicholas Rescher writes on the interpretation of philosophical texts. Then Catherine Wilson and Andreas Blank explicate and critique Rescher’s theories through analysis of the mill passage from Leibniz’s _Monadology._.

Ernst Waldfried Josef Wenzel Mach was born 18 February 1838 in the Moravian village of Chrlice (near Brno), at that time part of the Austrian Monarchy, now the Czech Republic, and died 19 February 1916 in Vaterstetten (near Munich). He enjoyed a very successful career as an experimental physicist (the unit for the velocity of sound has been named after him). His importance for the philosophy of science derives mainly from his “historico‐critical” writings (Mach 1872, 1883, 1896b, 1921). Mach studied mathematics and physics at the University of Vienna (1855–60, doctorate in physics 1860, his “Habilitation” (i.e., qualification to become a university professor) 1861) and his subsequent work was in the physiology of the senses. In 1864 he became professor first of mathematics and then (1866) of physics at Graz University; from 1867 to 1895 he was professor of experimental physics at Prague University; and in 1895 he took a chair in “Philosophy, especially the History and Theory of the Inductive Sciences” at Vienna University. In 1898 a stroke ended Mach's university teaching, but he was able to continue scientific work to a certain degree.

This open access book examines the many contributions of Paul Lorenzen, an outstanding philosopher from the latter half of the 20th century. It features papers focused on integrating Lorenzen's original approach into the history of logic and mathematics. The papers also explore how practitioners can implement Lorenzen’s systematical ideas in today’s debates on proof-theoretic semantics, databank management, and stochastics. Coverage details key contributions of Lorenzen to constructive mathematics, Lorenzen’s work on lattice-groups and divisibility theory, and modern set theory and Lorenzen’s critique of actual infinity. The contributors also look at the main problem of Grundlagenforschung and Lorenzen’s consistency proof and Hilbert’s larger program. In addition, the papers offer a constructive examination of a Russell-style Ramified Type Theory and a way out of the circularity puzzle within the operative justification of logic and mathematics. Paul Lorenzen's name is associated with the Erlangen School of Methodical Constructivism, of which the approach in linguistic philosophy and philosophy of science determined philosophical discussions especially in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s. This volume features 10 papers from a meeting that took place at the University of Konstanz.

This Open Access volume is based on the 'Early Carnap in Context’ workshop that took place in Konstanz in 2017 and looks at Rudolf Carnap’s philosophy, documented in his recently released diaries, from a combination of historical, cultural and philosophical perspectives. It enables further evaluation of the diaries and traces newly found interrelationships and their systematic definition. From a cultural and historical point of view, Logical Empiricism and Carnap’s pivotal opus, The Logical Structure of the World, did not evolve in a vacuum. This applies equally in a history of philosophy context as well as under consideration of contemporary historical and cultural influences such as the socio-cultural setting in Vienna and Prague, the correlation between Logical Empiricism and Bauhaus modernism, the connection to the Life Reform Movement or the Youth Movement with its own life philosophy. Pursuing Carnap’s progression on a micro level of history and referring the results back to Carnap’s philosophy is now facilitated by recent access to his Diaries from 1908–1935. These shorthand records, reading lists, travel reports and notes constitute a valuable source for the research of networks and social movements which left their mark on him.

I offer a revision (“reload”) of an earlier paper on logical-empiricism’s philosophy of biology by locating its central theses in the context of the international conferences of Prague (1934), Paris (1935), and Copenhagen (1936), so important for the development of logical empiricism and its spread in the Western world. My theses are that logical empiricism did not contribute in the same way to the development of the philosophy of biology, as it did, e.g., to the development of philosophy of mathematics or physics. The reasons for this failure were: (1o) logical empiricists were largely ignorant of the biological sciences; (2o) they concentrated on an unproductive (“ideological”) framework (anti-vitalism, reduction) that they took to be the philosophy of biology; (3o) this prevented them from dealing with actual problems of biological science. Between the various sections of the paper, I insert “intermezzos” that present several conference participants within a wider historical context (i.e., the Great War, persecution, language).

Grünbaum's three chief fields of research were space-time philosophy, the methodological credentials of psychoanalysis, and reasons given in favor of the existence of God. Grünbaum defended the so-called conventionality thesis of physical geometry. He partially followed Hans Reichenbach in this respect but developed a new ontological argument for the conventionality claim in addition. In addressing the physical basis of the direction of time, Grünbaum advocated that there is a physical basis for the distinction between the past and the future, but no such basis for the idea of a ‘present’ moving through time. His main claim in scrutinizing Freud’s theory methodologically was that supporting the causal claims Freud made would have required data that go beyond the clinical setting. Finally, Grünbaum worked on the philosophy of religion and set out to undermine arguments for the existence of God.

Michael Ende’s bestseller/The Neverending Story/is set in a magical world called “Fantastica”. In Fantastica, there are heroes and villains, just as in the world of universities and academies. There is even an entity, or better: a non-entity of shaky existence, das Nichts, the Nothingness – loved by some philosophers like Martin Heidegger. In Fantastica Nothingness is able to create trouble and destruction. The same is true in the land of academic history and philosophy of science – let us call it “HOPOSia”. In HOPOSia, particularly in its Anglophone provinces, Nothingness of knowledge and information has succeeded in building up strong opinions about the topic “Mach and Relativity”, and has created confusion and disinformation. However, you may slightly relax; our story in HOPOSia is less cruel so far and more peaceful than what happens in Fantastica. Sometimes it has even entertaining aspects. There are similarities, though: If there had not been lies and manipulation of believes, our story would have ended years ago. It went on instead and will possibly do so forever.

Das Thema dieser Überlegungen ist die deutsche Philosophie und sind deutsche Philoso­phen im Nationalsozialismus. (Für unsere politisch korrekten Ohrenspitzer(innen): es war keine Frau dabei.)1 Vorweg sei gesagt, verbrecherische Schurken finden wir unter ihnen nicht, anders als bei z. B. Juristen und Medizinern. ,,Auschwitz" wurde nicht von Philoso­phen betrieben. Die Praxisferne der Philosophie hat manchmal eben auch Vorteile. Teil I beschäftigt sich mit Philosophie und Philosophen im „Dritten Reich" im allgemei­nen. Teil II stellt eine Fallstudie (Oskar Becker) vor, während der dritte Teil ansatzweise eine noch skizzenhafte und vielleicht kontroverse Antwort auf die Frage versucht, welche philosophischen Umstände es begünstigt haben, daß Philosophen zu Naziphilosophen wurden, und welche dies vielleicht eher verhindert haben.

Few people, if any, still argue that science in all its aspects is a value-free endeavor. At the very least, values affect decisions about the choice of research problems to investigate and the uses to which the results of research are applied. But what about the actual doing of science? As Science, Values, and Objectivity reveals, the connections and interactions between values and science are quite complex. The essays in this volume identify the crucial values that play a role in science, distinguish some of the criteria that can be used for value identification, and elaborate the conditions for warranting certain values as necessary or central to the very activity of scientific research. Recently, social constructivists have taken the presence of values within the scientific model to question the basis of objectivity. However, the contributors to <I>Science, Values, and Objectivity</I> recognize that such acknowledgment of the role of values does not negate the fact that objects exist in the world. Objects have the power to constrain our actions and thoughts, though the norms for these thoughts lie in the public, social world. Values may be decried or defended, praised or blamed, but in a world that strives for a modicum of reason, values, too, must be reasoned. Critical assessment of the values that play a role in scientific research is as much a part of doing good science as interpreting data.

n this article the author develops a critique of reductionism in biological sciences from three different points of view. The first is related to the problem of reduction in the context of scientific theories. More specifically, reduction deals with a special form of intertheoretic relationship between molecular biology and the rest of biology. The second meaning of reductionism has to do with the significance of its genetic outfit for the ontogeny of an organism, i.e. its development from zygote to its final or adult structure and function. Third, closely related to this more biological topic are questions about the anthropological consequences of the application of reductionistic methodologies for the explanation and evaluation of human behaviour.

In recent decades, English has become the uncontestable lingua franca of philosophy of science and of most other areas of philosophy and of the humanities. To have a lingua franca produces enormous benefits for the entire scientific community. The price for those benefits, however, is paid almost exclusively by non-native speakers of English. Section 1 identifies three asymmetries that individual NoNES researchers encounter: ‘publication asymmetry’, ‘resources asymmetry’, and ‘team asymmetry’. Section 2 deals with ‘globalized parochialism asymmetry’: thanks to English being a lingua franca, a special perspective, mostly US and British, is being globalized and is replacing European topics and approaches. This has serious consequences for history of philosophy as well as for philosophical theory: thinkers of the past tend to be dealt with on the global level at best only if and insofar they are translated into English. Similarly, the theoretical agenda of globalized philosophy of scien...