Andreas Kemmerling

Glauben und unser Begriff von ihm stehen seit wenigstens hundert Jahren mit im Zentrum der theoretischen Philosophie. Glauben im weitesten Sinn: jederlei Art des Fürwahrhaltens. Die Frage, was es ist und welchen Begriff wir davon haben, war und bleibt ein Thema insbesondere auch der Erkenntnistheorie, der Philosophie des Geistes und der Ontologie. Welche Auskünfte bietet die Philosophie heute darüber, was das Glauben ist? Wie gut sind sie? Inwieweit lassen sie sich aus dem Begriff begründen, den wir vom Glauben haben? Was für ein Begriff ist das eigentlich? Können wir Wissen vom Glauben haben, wenigstens vom eigenen? Solchen Fragen geht dieser Essay nach, oft ohne definitive Antwort. Es ist eher der Versuch, erkennbar werden zu lassen, weshalb die Erwartung, es gebe solche Antworten, keinen guten philosophischen Grund hat. Und daß dies kein Grund ist, die Wirklichkeit des Glaubens in Frage zu ziehen.

Die „Meditationen“ sind ohne Zweifel ein Meilenstein und ein Meisterwerk des abendländischen Denkens. Durch sie wurde Descartes zum,Vater der modernen Philosophie‘ – und die Erkenntnistheorie auf Jahrhunderte zu deren Fundamentaldisziplin. Bis heute eignet sich kaum ein anderes epochemachendes Werk besser dazu, in der Auseinandersetzung mit den Argumentationsgängen eines Klassikers selbst zu erfahren, was philosophisches Denken ist – und wie es geht. Die neun Kapitel dieses Kommentars sind Originalbeiträge. Sie sollen Studierende und Dozenten bei der Lektüre begleiten und dazu beitragen, das intellektuelle Vergnügen an der Tiefe der „Meditationen“ noch zu steigern. Mit Beiträgen von: Lilli Alanen, Gary Hatfield, Andreas Hüttemann, Andreas Kemmerling, Tobias Rosefeldt, Andreas Schmidt und Hans-Peter Schütt.

There is ample evidence for this claim, both in time-honoured works and in recent publications. Before I concentrate on some of the old stuff, let me briefly turn to recent examples. The following sample of quotations from a Nobel Laureate, a leading neuroscientist and a German professor of ‘neuro-didactics’ may illustrate how deep the confusion about what a person is can go among the educated, even today. Francis Crick stated his Astonishing Hypothesis as follows: “You” [...] are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: “You’re nothing but a bunch of neurons.” This idea is so alien to the ideas of most people alive today that it can truly be called astonishing.1 A few years later, this ‘idea’ seemed not anymore astonishing to Michael Gazzaniga who prefers to put it this way: Some simple facts make it..

In his book Naturalizing the Mind, Fred Dretske, among other things, gives what he thinks is a naturalist account of what he calls introspective knowledge.1 I shall not quarrel with his labels; I shall quarrel with what he tries to sell by using them. For him, introspective knowledge is “the mind’s direct knowledge of itself”,2 and he concentrates on knowledge of one’s own current mental occurrences, especially those which belong to the realm of sensory perception. An example he discusses is the knowledge somebody has who looks at something and sees it as blue, and thereby knows that he is, as Dretske puts it, “representing” it as blue. I shall stick to this example. Harvey is looking at my shirt, and he thereby comes to know that he is representing it as blue. Dretske wants to answer the question: What is really happening when Harvey acquires this piece of introspective knowledge? Let me first give, in a very rough way, what I take to be Dretske’s basic idea. Introspective knowledge is not acquired by anything like looking inside oneself. One looks in the same direction as one does when one is acquiring “extraspective” knowledge. Harvey doesn’t first look at my shirt, saying “Uhuh, this shirt looks blue, but now I’d like to find out how I am representing it”, and then turns to look at something else in order to find out what the colour is he is representing the shirt to have. Harvey only looks at the shirt, when he acquires this item of introspective knowledge. In looking at that shirt, he acquires all the information he needs for acquiring the knowledge about himself that he is representing it as blue. The eyes’ job is done. The rest is exploiting that very information, not acquiring any new information

It is often assumed that Paul Grice, in one way or another, has made an important contribution to the theory of speech acts} Grice, as far as I can see, never expressly addresses Austin’s theory in his published work. He hardly ever uses the speech act terminology of "illocution", "perlocution", etc.2 So what does the more or less implicit Gricean contribution to the theory of speech acts consist in'? There is more than one good answer to this question. I shall concentrate on a particularly influential one, which goes back to Strawson (1964). It says that Austin, in his account of the nature of illocutionary acts, over-emphasized the role of conventions; that Austin went wrong in characterizing illocutionary acts as acts which are essentially conventional. The Gricean contribution to speech act theory, according to the envisaged answer, is twofold, both diagnostic and therapeutic. First, it helps us see where and why Austin went wrong in taking illocutionary acts to be essentially conventional. Second, it suggests an essentially intentional — instead of an essentially conventional- element in illocutionary acts. In his 1964 paper Strawson tried to bring out, as regards the interplay of convention and intention in illocutionary acts, both what can be conceded to Austin and what must be learnt from Grice. Austin (1962: 115) had said that "the performance of an illocutionaiy act involves the securing of uptake". Strawson (1964: 158 ff) interprets Austin as meani_ng to say that the performance of an illocutionary act involves understanding of illocutionary force. Understanding of illocutionary force involves, according to Strawson, grasping a "compleX [speaker’s] intention" (ib.: 160), and it is here, of course, where he brings Gricean ideas into _Austin’s scheme of what the essence of illocution is. He says.