•  9
    Unknown Peers
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies 31 (3): 382-401. 2023.
    Unknown peers create a problem for those epistemologists who argue that we should be conciliatory in cases of peer disagreement. The standard interpretation of ‘being conciliatory’ has it that we should revise our opinions concerning a specific subject matter whenever we encounter someone who is as competent and well informed as we are concerning this subject matter (and thus is our peer) and holds a different opinion. As a consequence, peers whom we have never encountered and who are hence unkn…Read more
  •  9
    Sind Gedankenexperimente in der praktischen Philosophie besonders?
    Zeitschrift für Praktische Philosophie 8 (2): 247-276. 2022.
    Dieser Text geht der Frage nach, ob und, wenn ja, inwieweit sich Gedankenexperimente in der praktischen Philosophie in ihrer Struktur und ihrer epistemischen Signifikanz von Gedankenexperimenten in der theoretischen Philosophie oder in den Naturwissenschaften unterscheiden. Anhand einer allgemeinen Strukturanalyse von Gedankenexperimenten wird dabei aufgezeigt, dass bei Gedankenexperimenten in der praktischen Philosophie zwar häufig die angemessene Bewertung eines zugrunde gelegten Szenarios im …Read more
  •  17
    Conciliatory Views on Peer Disagreement and the Order of Evidence Acquisition
    Kriterion – Journal of Philosophy 36 (1): 33-50. 2022.
    The evidence that we get from peer disagreement is especially problematic from a Bayesian point of view since the belief revision caused by a piece of such evidence cannot be modelled along the lines of Bayesian conditionalisation. This paper explains how exactly this problem arises, what features of peer disagreements are responsible for it, and what lessons should be drawn for both the analysis of peer disagreements and Bayesian conditionalisation as a model of evidence acquisition. In particu…Read more
  •  8
    Ethical Concerns Regarding Advanced Screening Systems
    9th Future Security 2014. Security Research ConferenceSeptember 16 – 18, 2014, Berlin; Proceedings. 2014.
    We are currently observing a shift in the relevance of ethical concerns regarding security screening systems. Due to technological progress, so my hypothesis goes, more direct consequences that such systems may have on the screening subjects' health and bodily privacy become increasingly unimportant compared to more indirect ones resulting from unrestrained information processing and excessive proliferation. However, a specific technical design of a screening system may help to prevent ethically…Read more
  •  5
    Können wir als Personen irreversible Gedächtnisverluste überleben? Wie steht es mit Teletransportationen? Wie mit jahrelangem Einfrieren? Fragen wie diese sind weit davon entfernt, bloße Denksportaufgaben für Science-Fiction-Fans zu sein. Vielmehr verraten uns Antworten darauf, welche unserer Eigenschaften uns wirklich wichtig sind und was unser Wesen ausmacht. Unglücklicherweise beantworten Vertreter unterschiedlicher Theorien personaler Identität diese Fragen auf völlig verschiedene Weise. Man…Read more
  • The Non-Conservativeness of Legal Definitions
    In Geert Keil & Ralf Poscher (eds.), Vagueness and Law: Philosophical and Legal Perspectives, Oxford University Press. 2016.
    What philosophers have in mind when they think about vagueness are sorites cases. Unlike vague scientific or artificial expressions, however, vague natural language expressions do not display the kind of vagueness that we associate with the sorites; they rather display what I call cluster vagueness. A non-trivial consequence of this is that those legal definitions that state precisifications of natural language concepts not only add aspects of meaning to existing expressions but also effectively…Read more
  •  386
    Baker's First-person Perspectives: They Are Not What They Seem
    Phenomenology and Mind 7 158-168. 2015.
    Lynne Baker's concept of a first-person perspective is not as clear and straightforward as it might seem at first glance. There is a discrepancy between her argumentation that we have first-person perspectives and some characteristics she takes first-person perspectives to have, namely, that the instances of this capacity necessarily persist through time and are indivisible and unduplicable. Moreover, these characteristics cause serious problems concerning personal identity.
  •  793
    Zwölf Antworten auf Williams' Paradox
    Zeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung 71 (1): 128-154. 2017.
    Theories of personal identity face a paradox, which traces back to Bernard Williams: some scenarios obviously show that mental continuity is what solely matters in survival; others, on the contrary, show with equal obviousness that it is bodily continuity. Different authors have produced diverging and partly conflicting answers in response to that problem. Based on recent research concerning the structure of philosophical thought experiment, this paper reevaluates and, for the first time, neatly…Read more
  •  31
    Armchair Disagreement
    Metaphilosophy 48 (4): 527-549. 2017.
    A commonly neglected feature of the so-called Equal Weight View, according to which we should give our peers’ opinions the same weight we give our own, is its prima facie incompatibility with the common picture of philosophy as an armchair activity: an intellectual effort to seek a priori knowledge. This view seems to imply that our beliefs are more likely to be true if we leave our armchair in order to find out whether there actually are peers who, by disagreeing with us, force us to revise our…Read more
  •  34
    Epistemic Peerhood, Likelihood, and Equal Weight
    Logos and Episteme 8 (3): 307-344. 2017.
    Standardly, epistemic peers regarding a given matter are said to be people of equal competence who share all relevant evidence. Alternatively, one can define epistemic peers regarding a given matter as people who are equally likely to be right about that matter. I argue that a definition in terms of likelihood captures the essence of epistemic peerhood better than the standard definition or any variant of it. What is more, a likelihood definition implies the truth of the central thesis in the de…Read more
  •  78
    This paper outlines the often striking parallels of various approaches to ontic vagueness, as well as their even more striking differences. Though circling around the same idea, some of these approaches were developed to solve quite diverse theoretical problems and encounter different challenges. In addition to these difficulties, the frequently disregarded epistemological problems of all theories of ontic vagueness turn out to be even more serious under critical scrutiny. The same holds for the…Read more