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2818Writing the Austrian Traditions: Relations Between Philosophy and Literature, Edmonton: (edited book)University of Alberta Press. 2003.
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1371Wittgenstein's Enigmatic Remarks on ShakespeareIn Craig Bourne & Emily Caddick Bourne (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Shakespeare and Philosophy, Routledge. pp. 197-204. 2018.
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1251Introduction: The Place of Beauty in Contemporary AestheticsIn Wolfgang Huemer & Íngrid Vendrell Ferran (eds.), Beauty: New Essays in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, Philosophia. 2019.The notion of beauty has endured a troublesome history over the last few decades. While for centuries beauty has been considered one of the central values of art, there have also been times when it seemed old-fashioned to even mention the term. The present volume aims to explore the nature of beauty and to shed light its place in contemporary philosphy and art practice
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540Erleben und Erkenntnis: Kognitive Funktionen der LiteraturIn Mathis Lessau & Nora Zügel (eds.), Die Rückkehr des Erlebnisses in den Geisteswissenschaften, Ergon Verlag. 2019.Literatur ist ein sehr vielschichtiges und lebendiges Phänomen, das beständig im Wandel ist. So wie sie im Laufe der Jahrhunderte und in den verschiedenen Kulturkreisen unter-schiedliche Formen angenommen und anderen Funktionen gedient hat, liegt es in ihrer Natur, immer wieder neue Ausdrucksformen zu entwickeln, die den sich ändernden Be-dürfnissen und Rahmenbedingungen gerecht werden können. Auch die theoretische Aus-einandersetzung mit der Literatur ist Veränderungen unterworfen, die manchmal…Read more
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527Power and Limits of a Picture: On the Notion of Thought Experiments in the Philosophy of LiteratureIn Falk Bornmüller, Mathis Lessau & Johannes Franzen (eds.), Literature as Thought Experiment?: Perspectives From Philosophy and Literary Studies, Fink. pp. 71-82. 2019.
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472Brentano's conception of philosophy as rigorous scienceBrentano Studien 16 (1): 53-72. 2018.Abstract: Brentano’s conception of scientific philosophy had a strong influence on his students and on the intellectual atmosphere of Vienna in the late nineteenth century. The aim of this article is to expose Brentano’s conception and to contrast his views with that of two traditions he is said to have considerably influenced: phenomenology and analytic philosophy. I will shed light on the question of how and to what extent Brentano’s conception of philosophy as a rigorous science has had an im…Read more
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468The philosopher as artist: Ludwig Wittgenstein seen through Edoardo PaolozziIn Diego Mantoan & Luigi Perissinotto (eds.), The philosopher and the Artist: Wittgenstein and Paolozzi, Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 31-43. 2019.In this article I argue that the strong fascination that Wittgenstein has had for artists cannot be explained primarily by the content of his work, and in particular not by his sporadic observation on aesthetics, but rather by stylistic features of his work formal aspects of his writing. Edoardo Paolozzi’s testimony shows that artists often had a feeling of acquaintance or familiarity with the philosopher, which I think is due to stylistic features of his work, such as the colloquial tone in wh…Read more
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369Mirrors, Windows, and PaintingsEstetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics 1 22-32. 2022.What do we see in a mirror? There is an ongoing debate whether mirrors present us with images of objects or whether we see, through the mirror, the objects themselves. Roberto Casati has recently argued that there is a categorical difference between images and mirror-reflections. His argument depends on the observation that mirrors, but not paintings, are sensitive to changes in the observer’s prospective. In our paper we scrutinize Casati’s argument and present a modal argument that shows that …Read more
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356Two Pillars of Institutions: Constitutive Rules and ParticipationIn Leo Townsend, Preston Stovall & Hans Bernhard Schmid (eds.), The Social Institution of Discursive Norms. Historical, Naturalistic, and Pragmatic Perspectives, Routledge. 2021.The creation of new institutions and the initiation of new forms of behaviour cannot be explained only on the basis of constitutive rules – they also require a broader commitment of individuals who participate in social practices and, thus, to become members of a community. In this paper, I argue that the received conception of constitutive rules shows a problematic intellectualistic bias that becomes particularly manifest in three assumptions: (i) constitutive rules have a logical form, (ii) co…Read more
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344Rule-following practices in a natural worldJournal of Transcendental Philosophy 1 (1): 161-181. 2020.I address the question of whether naturalism can provide adequate means for the scientific study of rules and rule-following behavior. As the term "naturalism" is used in many different ways in the contemporary debate, I will first spell out which version of naturalism I am targeting. Then I will recall a classical argument against naturalism in a version presented by Husserl. In the main part of the paper I will sketch a conception of rule-following behavior that is influenced by Sellars and Ha…Read more
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341Engaging with Works of FictionRivista di Estetica 70 (1/2019): 107-124. 2019.The contemporary debate in the philosophy of literature is strongly shaped by the anticognitivist challenge, according to which works of literary fiction (that contain propositions that are neither literally true nor affirmed by the author) cannot impart (relevant) knowledge to the readers or enrich their worldly understanding. Anti-cognitivists appreciate works of literary fiction for their aesthetic values and so risk to reduce them to mere ornaments that are entertaining, but eventually usele…Read more
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336The Trade between Fiction and Reality: Smuggling across Imagination and the WorldDiscipline Filosofiche 32 (2): 191-213. 2022.The current debate on literary cognitivism in the philosophy of fiction typically assumes that we can rigorously distinguish between fictional and factual, and focuses on the question of whether and how works of fiction can impart propositional knowledge to the reader. In this paper we suggest that this way of framing the debate may be problematic. We argue that works of fiction almost inevitably include a reference to the real world and that – contrary to what is usually assumed – the exchange …Read more
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309Was Brentano a systematic philosopher?In Mauro Antonelli & Thomas Binder (eds.), The Philosophy of Franz Brentano, . 2021.In a series of recent contributions it has been argued that Franz Brentano’s philosophical position constituted a unified system; Uriah Kriegel has called Brentano's philosophy as “the last grand system of Western philosophy”. The goal of the present paper is to scrutinise this claim and shed light on Brentano's methodological approach and his style of reasoning. I pay particular attention to two aspects: Brentano’s view that philosophy should be done in a rigorous, scientific manner and the fra…Read more
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299Beauty: New Essays in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art (edited book)Philosophia. 2019.The notion of beauty has been and continues to be one of the main concerns of aesthetics and art theory. Traditionally, the centrality of beauty in the experience of art was widely accepted and beauty was considered one of the key values in aesthetics. In recent debate, however, the significance of the notion of beauty has been discussed controversially. Especially in the second half of the twentieth century, the role of beauty was strongly challenged both by artists and in philosophy and theory…Read more
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297Is Brentano's Method a Unifying Element of the Brentano School?Rivista di Filosofia Neo-Scolastica (4): 897-910. 2019.Among historians of philosophy it is often taken for granted that the “Brentano school” was one of the influential philosophical movements at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century – but Brentano’s own contributions are often eclipsed by that of his direct students. This invites to reflect on the nature of and the unity within the school. Since Brentano’s conception of a rigorous, scientific philosophy had a strong impact on his students, it has been argued that thi…Read more
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231Reading (with) OthersIn Sonia Sedivy (ed.), Art, Representation, and Make-Believe: Essays on the Philosophy of Kendall L. Walton, Routledge. 2021.Kendall Walton’s account of make-believe takes the social dimension of imagination into account. In this paper I aim to extend this suggestion and argue that works of fiction allow for encounters with concrete (yet fictitious) persons with a distinct point of view and a discernible perspective. These encounters allow us to contrast the perspective(s) that emerge from the work with one’s own. I will then discuss two moments of the social dimension: imagining fictional scenarios is a social practi…Read more
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226Fictional Narrative and the Other’s PerspectiveCroatian Journal of Philosophy 65 (22): 161-179. 2022.Anti-cognitivism is best understood as a challenge to explain how works of fictional narrative can add to our worldly knowledge. One way to respond to this challenge is to argue that works of fictional narrative add to our knowledge by inviting us to explore, in the imagination, the perspectives or points of view of others. In the present paper, I distinguish two readings of this thesis that reflect two very different conceptions of “perspective”: a first understanding focuses on what the world …Read more
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219Brentano’s Four Phases and the Rise of Scientific Philosophy in the Light of his Relation to his StudentsIn Ion Tanasescu, Alexandru Bejinariu, Susan Krantz Gabriel & Constantin Stoenescu (eds.), Brentano and the Positive Philosophy of Comte and Mill: With Translations of Original Writings on Philosophy as Science by Franz Brentano, De Gruyter. pp. 401-14. 2022.Brentano’s position in the history of philosophy is often illustrated by the long list of important philosophers who have studied with him. Yet, the relations between Brentano and his students were not always without friction. In the present article I argue that Brentano’s students were most attracted by his conception of a scientific philosophy, which promised to leave the received tradition (German Idealism) behind and to mark the beginning of a new period in the history of philosophy – a proj…Read more
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196PercezioneIn C. Cantillo & S. Achella (eds.), Le parole e i numeri della filosofia, Carocci. pp. 172-7. 2020.
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112Husserl and Haugeland on constitutionSynthese 137 (3): 345-368. 2003.Both Husserl and Haugeland develop an account of constitution to address the question of how our mental episodes can be about physical objects and thus, through the intentional relation, bridge the gap between the mental and the physical. The respective theories of the two philosophers of very different background show not only how mental episodes can have empirical content, but also how this content is shaped by past experiences or a holistic background of other mental episodes. In this article…Read more
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106Why read literature? The cognitive function of formIn John Gibson, Wolfgang Huemer & Luca Pocci (eds.), A Sense of the world. Essays on Fiction, Narrative and Knowledge, Routledge. pp. 233-245. 2007.In this article I focus on the question question of why we actually do read literary texts and what the merits of engaging with literary works are. The central argument is that (among the many other functions literature is abile to perform) literature is cognitively valuable by focusing not on what is said, but on how it is said. Reading literary texts adds to our expressive capacities, enriches our conceptual schemes and can so allow us to get a better grasp of (relevant aspects of) the world. …Read more
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96Mathematics, experience and laboratories: Herbart’s and Brentano’s role in the rise of scientific psychologyHistory of the Human Sciences 23 (3): 72-94. 2010.In this article we present and compare two early attempts to establish psychology as an independent scientific discipline that had considerable influence in central Europe: the theories of Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776—1841) and Franz Brentano (1838—1917). While both of them emphasize that psychology ought to be conceived as an empirical science, their conceptions show revealing differences. Herbart starts with metaphysical principles and aims at mathematizing psychology, whereas Brentano rejec…Read more
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74A Sense of the World: Essays on Fiction, Narrative, and Knowledge (edited book)Routledge. 2007.A team of leading contributors from both philosophical and literary backgrounds have been brought together in this impressive book to examine how works of literary fiction can be a source of knowledge. Together, they analyze the important trends in this current popular debate. The innovative feature of this volume is that it mixes work by literary theorists and scholars with work of analytic philosophers that combined together provide a comprehensive statement of the variety of ways in which wor…Read more
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66The transition from causes to norms: Wittgenstein on trainingGrazer Philosophische Studien 71 (1): 205-225. 2006.Anti-reductionist philosophers have often argued that mental and linguistic phenomena contain an intrinsically normative element that cannot be captured by the natural sciences which focus on causal rather than rational relations. This line of reasoning raises the questions of how reasons could evolve in a world of causes and how children can be acculturated to participate in rule-governed social practices. In this paper I will sketch a Wittgensteinian answer to these questions. I will first poi…Read more
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65Johann Friedrich Herbart on MindIn Sandra Lapointe (ed.), Philosophy of mind in the nineteenth century, Routledge, Taylor & Francs Group. 2018.
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64Edmund Husserl: Die Bernauer manuskripte über Das zeitbewusstsein (1917/ 18). Husserliana bd. XXXIII. Herausgegeben Von Rudolf Bernet und Dieter Lohmar. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001 (review)Grazer Philosophische Studien 68 (1): 228-232. 2005.
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62The Constitution of Consciousness: A Study in Analytic PhenomenologyRoutledge. 2005.Through the work of philosophers like Sellars, Davidson and McDowell, the question of how the mind is related to the world has gained new importance in contemporary analytic philosophy. This book demonstrates that Husserl's phenomenological analyses of the structure of consciousness can provide fruitful insights for developing an original approach to these questions.
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60Phenomenology and analysis: essays on Central European philosophy (edited book)Ontos. 2004.The history of twentieth century philosophy is characterised by the gap between analytic and continental philosophy -- even though both have their roots in a tradition referred to as 'Austrian' or 'Central-European' philosophy. The essays in this volume show in historical and systematic studies, how a reassessment of this 'Central-European' tradition can build an interesting bridge between phenomenology and analytic philosophy and, thus, create a new foundation that allows for an original perspe…Read more
Wolfgang Huemer
Università Degli Studi Di Parma
University of Parma
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Università Degli Studi Di ParmaAssociate Professor
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Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Mind |
Aesthetics |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
20th Century Philosophy |