Sebastian Rödl

It is widely believed that we might be able produce life out of nonliving substances if we possessed the relevant knowledge. Thus synthetic biology is said to be on the way towards artificial life. But this is nonsense: “artificial life” cannot be thought. The idea that biological organisms could be produced reflects a misunderstandig of the concept “life”. Life is formally characterized by the fact that that which in the case of artifacts is three distinct activities - being something, producing it, and using it - is one. For a living being, to be is to be the source of its own activity through its own activity. Hence, if there is an activity of producing distinct from being what is produced - as would have to be the case in artificial life - what is thus produced is not life.

Die neuzeitliche Philosophie beginnt mit der Einsicht Descartes', daß sich die Aussagen, in denen man sich selbst Gedanken, Absichten, Meinungen zuschreibt, fundamental von denen unterscheiden, in denen man die Welt der körperlichen Dinge beschreibt. Descartes, und mit ihm eine bis heute mächtige Tradition, schließt daraus, daß sich diese Ich-Aussagen auf eine eigene Welt geistiger Dinge beziehen. Der von den Kognitions- und Neurowissenschaften inspirierte philosophische Naturalismus hat dagegen in jüngster Zeit eine Reihe von Arbeiten hervorgebracht, die dem Selbstbezug unseres geistigen Lebens einen Ort in der einheitlichen Welt natürlicher Phänomene zuweisen. Das vorliegende Buch zeigt, warum die cartesische wie die naturalistische Deutung des bewußten Selbstbezugs gleichermaßen verfehlt sind.

Before and in the Groundwork, Kant argues as follows for the validity of the moral law: we want to be free. Following the moral law is the only way to be free. So we should follow the moral law.1 The first premise of this syllogism is treated differently before and in the Groundwork. First Kant thought it an empirical fact that men want to be free and want it more than anything else.2 Later he sought an a priori argument showing that we ought to want to be free and are right in thinking it good.3 The former justification of the moral law is superior. When we look to “salvage the normative core of Kantian moral philosophy” (Guyer 445), we should turn to it. – So far Paul Guyer. It is evident that Guyer fails to describe Kant's thought in the Groundwork. It is equally clear that Kant never held the position Guyer claims he held before the Groundwork. (The quotations Guyer gives in support of his claim show this.) Therefore I shall not discuss Guyer's interpretation of Kant. Instead I shall consider the philosophical merits of the position he ascribes to the pre‐critical Kant, and which he recommends as superior. We shall see that that position makes no sense. This indirectly addresses the interpretive question, as it is a reason against ascribing it to Kant.

The essay argues that there is no such thing as the epistemology of testimony as it is currently conceived: a subfield of epistemology that concerns itself with a special form of acquiring knowledge, a special kind of justification, a special sort of reason for belief. Rather, the concept of knowledge contains an account of the possibility of knowing from others. We cannot find ourselves in this predicament: we comprehend what knowledge is all right, and yet have difficulty seeing how one may, from the words of another, come to acquire that: knowledge. And if we cannot find ourselves in this predicament, then there can be no need to introduce, in response to it, concepts that currently attract much interest—trust, authority, sincerity, etc.

The publication of Frege’s Begriffsschrift in 1879 forever altered the landscape for many Western philosophers. Here, Sebastian Rödl traces how the Fregean influence, written all over the development and present state of analytic philosophy, led into an unholy alliance of an empiricist conception of sensibility with an inferentialist conception of thought. According to Rödl, Wittgenstein responded to the implosion of Frege’s principle that the nature of thought consists in its inferential order, but his Philosophical Investigations shied away from offering an alternative. Rödl takes up the challenge by turning to Kant and Aristotle as ancestors of this tradition, and in doing so identifies its unacknowledged question: the relation of judgment and truth to time. Rödl finds in the thought of these two men the answer he urges us to consider: the temporal and the sensible, and the atemporal and the intelligible, are aspects of one reality and cannot be understood independently of one another. In demonstrating that an investigation into the categories of the temporal can be undertaken as a contribution to logic, Rödl seeks to transform simultaneously our philosophical understanding of both logic and time.

The essay develops a disjunctive account of perception, showing that it needs to be renamed 'self-conscious power account'. For it is by reference to a self-conscious power of sensory knowledge that, on the one hand, the unity of perception and illusion and, on the other hand, the priority of perception over illusion, specifically, its priority in knowledge, is understood. The concept of a self-conscious power thus transpires as lying at the basis of a sound epistemology and response to sceptical arguments such as the argument from illusion