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704Ist der Begriff der Repräsentation obsolet?Zeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung 51 (3). 1997.Der Antirepräsentationalismus behauptet, es sei an der Zeit, das auf dem Begriff der Repräsentation basierende Paradigma der Philosophie zu verabschieden. Die von Rorty und anderen propagierte Unterscheidung von Repräsentationalismus und Antirepräsentationalismus beruht jedoch auf einem verkürzten Repräsentationsbegriff als Spiegelung. Der Begriff der Repräsentation, so wie er in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft gebraucht wird, hat nur wenig mit Spiegelung zu tun. Statt den Begriff der Repräsent…Read more
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1195Zwischen Weisheit und Wissenschaft - Schlicks weites philosophisches SpektrumGrazer Philosophische Studien 80 (1). 2010.
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267Structural Universals as Structural Parts: Toward a General Theory of Parthood and CompositionAxiomathes 20 (2-3). 2010.David Lewis famously argued against structural universals since they allegedly required what he called a composition “sui generis” that differed from standard mereological com¬position. In this paper it is shown that, although traditional Boolean mereology does not describe parthood and composition in its full generality, a better and more comprehensive theory is provided by the foundational theory of categories. In this category-theoretical framework a theory of structural universals can be fo…Read more
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731Description, Construction and Representation. From Russell and Carnap to StoneIn Guido Imagire & Christine Schneider (eds.), Untersuchungen zur Ontologie, . 2006.The first aim of this paper is to elucidate Russell’s construction of spatial points, which is to be <br>considered as a paradigmatic case of the "logical constructions" that played a central role in his epistemology and theory of science. Comparing it with parallel endeavours carried out by Carnap and Stone it is argued that Russell’s construction is best understood as a structural representation. It is shown that Russell’s and Carnap’s representational constructions may be considered as incomp…Read more
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1487Enlightenment and Formal Romanticism - Carnap’s Account of Philosophy as ExplicationVienna Circle Institute Yearbook 14. 2010.Carnap and Twentieth-Century Thought: Explication as En lighten ment is the first book in the English language that seeks to place Carnap's philosophy in a broad cultural, political and intellectual context. According to the author, Carnap synthesized many different cur rents of thought and thereby arrived at a novel philosophical perspective that remains strik ing ly relevant today. Whether the reader agrees with Carus's bold theses on Carnap's place in the landscape of twentieth-century philos…Read more
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470Russell’s Many PointsIn Alexander Hieke & Hannes Leitgeb (eds.), Reduction, Abstraction, Analysis, Ontos. pp. 11--239. 2009.Bertrand Russell was one of the protagonists of the programme of reducing “disagreeable” concepts to philosophically more respectable ones. Throughout his life he was engaged in eliminating or paraphrasing away a copious variety of allegedly dubious concepts: propositions, definite descriptions, knowing subjects, and points, among others. The critical aim of this paper is to show that Russell’s construction of points, which has been considered as a paradigm of a logical construction überhaupt, f…Read more
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485Counterfactual Deformation and Idealization in a Structuralist FrameworkPoznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 42. 1994.
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975Continuous Lattices and Whiteheadian Theory of SpaceLogic and Logical Philosophy 6 (n/a). 1998.In this paper a solution of Whitehead’s problem is presented: Starting with a purely mereological system of regions a topological space is constructed such that the class of regions is isomorphic to the Boolean lattice of regular open sets of that space. This construction may be considered as a generalized completion in analogy to the well-known Dedekind completion of the rational numbers yielding the real numbers . The argument of the paper relies on the theories of continuous lattices and “poi…Read more
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526Truthlikeness for Theories on Countable LanguagesIn Ian Jarvie, Karl Milford & David Miller (eds.), Karl Popper: A Centenary Assessment vol. 3, . 2006.
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508Geographie des Wissens und der Wissenschaften: Von der Encyclopédie zur KonstitutionstheorieIn Elisabeth Nemeth & Nicolas Roudet (eds.), Paris – Wien: Enzyklopädien im Vergleich, Springer. 2005.
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691Interactive RepresentationsRepresentaciones 1 (1). 2005.In this paper we argue that philosophy of science is in need of a comprehensive and deep theory of scientific representation. We contend that such a theory has to take into account the conceptual evolution of the notion of representation in the empirical science and mathematics.In particular, it is pointed out that the category-theoretical notion of an adjoint situation may be useful to shed new light on the intricate relation between the empirical and the theoretical by showing that scientific …Read more
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613A Representational Reconstruction of Carnap’s QuasianalysisPSA 1994 1. 1994.According to general wisdom, Carnap's quasianalysis is an ingenious but definitively flawed approach to epistemology and philosophy of science. I argue that this assessment is mistaken. Rather, Carnapian quasianalysis can be reconstructed as a special case of a general theory of structural representation. This enables us to exploit some interesting analogies of quasianalysis with the representational theory of measurement. It is shown how Goodman's well-known objections against the quasianalytic…Read more
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1119Werte bei CarnapZeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung 62 (2). 2006.Nach gängiger Auffassung nahm das Thema „Werte” in Carnaps Philosophie nur einen geringen Stellenwert ein. In dieser Arbeit soll gezeigt werden, daß diese Einschätzung der Korrektur bedarf: So wird der im „Aufbau“ vorgetragene Entwurf eines Konstitutionssystems mit Werten als der höchsten Schicht des Konstitutionssystems abgeschlossen. Auch die Quasianalyse als allgemeine Konstitutionsmethode steht in enger Beziehung zur Unterscheidung zwischen „Sein“ und „Gelten“, die für den werttheoretisch or…Read more
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895Between Heidelberg and Marburg: On the Aufbau’s Neokantian Origins and the AP/CP-DivideSapere Aude! 1. 2006.In A Parting of the Ways Michael Friedman proposed to conceive the contemporary divide between analytic philosophy (AP) and continental philosophy (CP) as the outcome of the bifurcation between the Neokantians of Heidelbarg and Marburg. According to Friedman, Carnap can be characterized as the executor of the Marburg school, while Heidegger is to be considered as the heir of the Southwest Neokantianism. In this paper it is argued that Carnap was much closer to the Southwest Neokantianism than us…Read more
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622Completions, Constructions, and CorollariesIn H. Pulte, G. Hanna & H.-J. Jahnke (eds.), Explanation and Proof in Mathematics: Philosophical and Educational Perspectives, Springer. 2009.According to Kant, pure intuition is an indispensable ingredient of mathematical proofs. Kant‘s thesis has been considered as obsolete since the advent of modern relational logic at the end of 19th century. Against this logicist orthodoxy Cassirer’s “critical idealism” insisted that formal logic alone could not make sense of the conceptual co-evolution of mathematical and scientific concepts. For Cassirer, idealizations, or, more precisely, idealizing completions, played a fundamental role in t…Read more
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458The Debate on Begriffstheorie between Cassirer and Marc-WogauVienna Circle Institute Yearbook 14. 2010.Abstract. The aim of this paper is to reconstruct the debate on Begriffstheorie between Ernst Cassirer, the Swe¬dish philosopher Konrad Marc-Wogau, and, virtually, Moritz Schlick. It took place during in the late thirties when Cassirer had immigrated to Sweden. While Cassirer argued for a rich “constitutive” theory of concepts, Marc-Wogau, and, in a different way, Schlick favored “austere” non-con¬sti¬¬tutive theories of concepts. Ironically, however, Cassirer used Schlick’s account as a weapon …Read more
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675Updating Classical MereologyIn C. Glymour, D. Westerstahl & W. Wang (eds.), Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science. Proceedings of the 13th International Congress, King’s College. 2009.
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648The Structure of Scientific Theories in Logical EmpiricismIn Alan Richardson & Thomas Uebel (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Logical Empiricism, Cambridge University Press. 2007.
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534Geometrical Leitmotifs in Carnap’s Early PhilosophyIn Richard Creath & Michael Friedman (eds.), Cambridge Companion to Rudolf Carnap, Cambridge University Press. 2007.
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74The space of mathematics: philosophical, epistemological, and historical explorations (edited book)W. de Gruyter. 1992.The Protean Character of Mathematics SAUNDERS MAC LANE (Chicago) 1. Introduction The thesis of this paper is that mathematics is protean. ...
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132Geometry of logic and truth approximationPoznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 83 (1): 431-454. 2005.In this paper it is argued that the theory of truth approximation should be pursued in the framework of some kind of geometry of logic. More specifically it is shown that the theory of interval structures provides a general framework for dealing with matters of truth approximation. The qualitative and the quantitative accounts of truthlikeness turn out to be special cases of the interval account. This suggests that there is no principled gap between the qualitative and quantitative approach. Rat…Read more
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689Carnap's metrical conventionalism versus differential topologyProc. 2004 Biennial Meeting of the PSA, vol. I, Contributed Papers 72 (5). 2004.Geometry was a main source of inspiration for Carnap’s conventionalism. Taking Poincaré as his witness Carnap asserted in his dissertation Der Raum (Carnap 1922) that the metrical structure of space is conventional while the underlying topological structure describes "objective" facts. With only minor modifications he stuck to this account throughout his life. The aim of this paper is to disprove Carnap's contention by invoking some classical theorems of differential topology. By this means his …Read more
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222Carnap’s Logical Empiricism, Values, and American PragmatismJournal of General Philosophy of Science 38 (1). 2006.Abstract. Value judgments are meaningless. This thesis was one of the notorious tenets of Carnap’s mature logical empiricism. Less well known is the fact that in the Aufbau values were con-sidered as philosophically respectable entities that could be constituted from value experiences. About 1930, however, values were banished to the realm of meaning-less me-taphysics, and Carnap came to endorse a strict emotivism. The aim of this paper is to shed new light on the question why Carnap abandoned h…Read more
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129Idealization in Cassirer's philosophy of mathematicsPhilosophia Mathematica 16 (2). 2008.The notion of idealization has received considerable attention in contemporary philosophy of science but less in philosophy of mathematics. An exception was the ‘critical idealism’ of the neo-Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer. According to Cassirer the methodology of idealization plays a central role for mathematics and empirical science. In this paper it is argued that Cassirer's contributions in this area still deserve to be taken into account in the current debates in philosophy of mathemati…Read more
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30The refined qualitative theory of truth approximation does not deliver: Remark on Kuipers (review)Erkenntnis 47 (2): 181-185. 1997.
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33Review of "Science and Necessity" (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 44 (3): 567-565. 1993.
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73Incompatible empirically equivalent theories: A structural explicationSynthese 103 (2). 1995.The thesis of the empirical underdetermination of theories (U-thesis) maintains that there are incompatible theories which are empirically equivalent. Whether this is an interesting thesis depends on how the term incompatible is understood. In this paper a structural explication is proposed. More precisely, the U-thesis is studied in the framework of the model theoretic or emantic approach according to which theories are not to be taken as linguistic entities, but rather as families of mathemati…Read more
Ludwig Maximilians Universität, München
Faculty of Philosophy, Philosophy of Science and Study of Religion
PhD, 1995
Donostia-San Sebastián, PV, Spain
PhilPapers Editorships
Rudolf Carnap |