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311. Introduction: Naturalism and Psychological Explanations To a large extent, contemporary philosophical debate takes place within a framework of naturalistic assumptions. From the perspective of the history of philosophy, naturalism is the legacy of positivism without its empiricist epistemology and empiricist conception of meaning and cognitive significance. Systematically, it is best to characterize naturalism as the philosophical articulation of the underlying presuppositions of a reductive …Read more
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131EmpathyStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2008.Despite its linguistic roots in ancient Greek, the concept of empathy is of recent intellectual heritage. Yet its history has been varied and colorful, a fact that is also mirrored in the multiplicity of definitions associated with the empathy concept in a number of different scientific and non-scientific discourses. In its philosophical heyday at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, empathy had been hailed as the primary means for gaining knowledge of other minds and as the method uniquely…Read more
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2Introduction: Empathy, simulation, and interpretation in the philosophy of the social sciencesIn K. R. Stueber & H. H. Kogaler (eds.), Empathy and Agency: The Problem of Understanding in the Human Sciences, Boulder: Westview Press. 2000.
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100The Problem Of Self-KnowledgeErkenntnis 56 (3): 269-296. 2002.This article develops a constitutive account of self-knowledgethat is able to avoid certain shortcomings of the standard response to the perceived prima facieincompatibility between privileged self-knowledge and externalism. It argues that ifone conceives of linguistic action as voluntary behavior in a minimal sense, one cannot conceive ofbelief content to be externalistically constituted without simultaneously assuming that the agent hasknowledge of his beliefs. Accepting such a constitutive ac…Read more
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Measuring empathyStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford (Ca): Center for the Study of Language and Information. Available From: Http://Plato. Stanford. Edu/Archives/Fall2008/Entries/Empathy/Measuring. Html. forthcoming.
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112How to think about rules and rule followingPhilosophy of the Social Sciences 35 (3): 307-323. 2005.This article will discuss the difficulties of providing a plausible account of rule following in the social realm. It will show that the cognitive model of rule following is not suited for this task. Nevertheless, revealing the inadequacy of the cognitive model does not justify the wholesale dismissal of understanding human practices as rule-following practices, as social theorists like Bourdieu or Dreyfus have argued. Instead it will be shown that rule-following behavior is best understood as b…Read more
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23Baker, Lynne Rudder., Naturalism and the First-Person Perspective (review)Review of Metaphysics 67 (4): 865-867. 2014.
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84Varieties of Empathy, Neuroscience and the Narrative Challenge to the Contemporary Theory of Mind DebateEmotion Revies 4 (1): 55-63. 2012.This article will defend the centrality of empathy and simulation for our understanding of individual agency within the conceptual framework of folk psychology. It will situate this defense in the context of recent developments in the theory of mind debate. Moreover, the article will critically discuss narrativist conceptions of social cognition that conceive of themselves as alternatives to both simulation and theory theory.
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66Theories explain, and so do historical narratives: But there are differencesJournal of the Philosophy of History 2 (2): 237-243. 2008.Anti-realists like Paul Roth conceive of historical narratives as having no genuine explanatory power, because historical events are not ready-made and reveal themselves only to the retrospective gaze of the historian. For that reason, the categories with the help of which historians identify historical events do not map onto categories of general theories of the world required for a genuine explanation of them. While I agree with Paul Roth that the significance of a historical event is revealed…Read more
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123Intentionalism, Intentional Realism, and EmpathyJournal of the Philosophy of History 3 (3): 290-307. 2009.Contemporary philosophers of history and interpretation theorists very often deny the thesis of intentional realism, because they reject intentionalism or the thesis that an agent's or author's intentions are relevant for the interpretive practice of the human sciences. I will defend intentional realism by showing why it is wrong to whole-heartedly reject intentionalism and by clarifying the logical relation between intentionalism and intentional realism. I will do so by discussing the two centr…Read more
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8Empathy, Mental Dispositions, and the Physicalist ChallengeIn Debating Dispositions: Issues in Metaphysics, Epistemology and Philosophy of Mind, Walter De Gruyter. pp. 257-277. 2009.
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