•  272
    Epigenetics, Responsiveness and Embodiment
    In Dana Mahr & Martina von Arx (eds.), De-Sequencing: Identity Work with Genes, Palgrave-macmillan. 2021.
    This short paper comments on the connections between epigenetics, responsiveness and embodiment. Epigenetics has solidified a new conception of DNA as “responsive,” and rightfully so. Yet, the discussion too easily falls back to metaphors of agency and can show a tendency to see responsiveness and embodiment as based on epigenetics, which is shown to be wrong.
  •  232
    On how to distinguish critique from an infringement of academic freedom
    Journal Philosophy and Theory of Higher Education 5 (2): 243-268. 2023.
    To have a well-functioning principle of academic freedom, we need to distin-guish critique from an infringement of academic freedom. To achieve this goal, this paper presents three necessary conditions for something to be an infringe-ment of academic freedom. These conditions allow to delineate cases in which at least one of the three conditions is not fulfilled. These are contrast cases that might – at first glance – look like infringements of academic freedom but are, in fact, not so. I will r…Read more
  •  10
    The humanities within and outside the academic world (review)
    Metascience 31 (3): 441-443. 2022.
  •  45
    Review of W.B. Drees' "What are the humanities for?" (review)
    Metascience. forthcoming.
    Willem B. Drees’ book defends the humanities as a valuable endeavor in understanding human beings that is vibrant and essential for the academic and non-academic world ... The review highlights two issues, the book's naturalism (presenting the humanities as a human necessity) and the book's idealistic outlook (presenting the humanities as following the value-free ideal).
  •  409
    The freedom we mean: A causal independence account of creativity and academic freedom
    European Journal for Philosophy of Science 11 (2): 1-23. 2021.
    Academic freedom has often been defended in a progressivist manner: without academic freedom, creativity would be in peril, and with it the advancement of knowledge, i.e. the epistemic progress in science. In this paper, I want to critically discuss the limits of such a progressivist defense of academic freedom, also known under the label ‘argument from truth.’ The critique is offered, however, with a constructive goal in mind, namely to offer an alternative account that connects creativity and …Read more
  •  387
    Digging the channels of inheritance: On How to Distinguish Between Cultural and Biological Inheritance
    Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 376. 2021.
    Theories of cultural evolution rest on the assumption that cultural inheritance is distinct from biological inheritance. Cultural and biological inheritance are two separate so-called channels of inheritance, two sub-systems of the sum total of developmental resources traveling in distinct ways between individual agents. This paper asks: what justifies this assumption? In reply, a philosophical account is offered that points at three related but distinct criteria that (taken together) make the d…Read more
  •  943
    In this Chapter, Maria Kronfeldner discusses whether psychological essentialism is a necessary part of dehumanization. This involves different elements of essentialism, and a narrow and a broad way of conceptualizing psychological essentialism, the first akin to natural kind thinking, the second based on entitativity. She first presents authors that have connected essentialism with dehumanization. She then introduces the error theory of psychological essentialism regarding the category of the hu…Read more
  •  2094
    Maria Kronfeldner’s Preface and Introduction to the Routledge Handbook of Dehumanization maps the landscape of dehumanization studies. She starts with a brief portrayal of the history of the field. The systematically minded sections that follow guide the reader through the resulting rugged landscape represented in the Handbook’s contributions. Different realizations, levels, forms, and ontological contrasts of dehumanization are distinguished, followed by remarks on the variety of targets of deh…Read more
  •  5
  •  91
    Routledge Handbook of Dehumanization (edited book)
    Routledge. 2021.
    A striking feature of atrocities, as seen in genocides, civil wars or violence against certain racial and ethnic groups, is the attempt to dehumanize – to deny and strip human beings of their humanity. Yet the very nature of dehumanization remains relatively poorly understood. The Routledge Handbook of Dehumanization is the first comprehensive and multidisciplinary reference source on the subject and an outstanding survey of the key concepts, issues and debates within dehumanization studies. Or…Read more
  •  254
    Wie können Philosoph/innen mit der Bedrohung der akademischen Freiheit umgehen, die von rechtspopulistischen Strömungen (in Deutschland, Europa und weltweit) und autoritären Staaten (wie der Türkei und Ungarn) ausgeht? – Diese Frage stand im Zentrum der Podiumsdiskussion „Bedrohtes Denken“, die während des DGPhil Kongresses in Berlin am Tag der Bundestagswahl 2017 stattfand. Es war eine Diskussion, deren Ende von der bedrückenden Nachricht überschattet wurde, die rechtsextreme AfD werde drittstä…Read more
  •  757
    Human nature has always been a foundational issue for philosophy. What does it mean to have a human nature? Is the concept the relic of a bygone age? What is the use of such a concept? What are the epistemic and ontological commitments people make when they use the concept? In What’s Left of Human Nature? Maria Kronfeldner offers a philosophical account of human nature that defends the concept against contemporary criticism. In particular, she takes on challenges related to social misuse of the …Read more
  •  1163
    Explaining Creativity
    In Berys Gaut & Matthew Kieran (eds.), Routledge Handbook on Creativity and Philosophy, Routledge. pp. 213-29. 2018.
    Creativity has often been declared, especially by philosophers, as the last frontier of science. The assumption is that it will defy explanation forever. I will defend two claims in order to oppose this assumption and to demystify creativity: (1) the perspective that creativity cannot be explained wrongly identifies creativity with what I shall call metaphysical freedom; (2) the Darwinian approach to creativity, a prominent naturalistic account of creativity, fails to give an explanation of crea…Read more
  •  930
    This paper addresses whether the often-bemoaned loss of unity of knowledge about humans, which results from the disciplinary fragmentation of science, is something to be overcome. The fragmentation of being human rests on a couple of distinctions, such as the nature-culture divide. Since antiquity the distinction between nature (roughly, what we inherit biologically) and culture (roughly, what is acquired by social interaction) has been a commonplace in science and society. Recently, the nature/…Read more
  •  622
    Divide and conquer: The authority of nature and why we disagree about human nature
    In Elizabeth Hannon & Tim Lewens (eds.), Why We Disagree About Human Nature, Oxford University Press. pp. 186-206. 2018.
    The term ‘human nature’ can refer to different things in the world and fulfil different epistemic roles. Human nature can refer to a classificatory nature (classificatory criteria that determine the boundaries of, and membership in, a biological or social group called ‘human’), a descriptive nature (a bundle of properties describing the respective group’s life form), or an explanatory nature (a set of factors explaining that life form). This chapter will first introduce these three kinds of ‘hum…Read more
  •  44
    Seeds of Change: A Comparative Review of Five New Collections in the Philosophy of Biology (review)
    Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 43 (1): 195-201. 2012.
  •  111
    The dissertation criticizes two analogical applications of Darwinism to the spheres of mind and culture: the Darwinian approach to creativity and memetics. These theories rely on three basic analogies: the ontological analogy states that the basic ontological units of culture are so-called memes, which are replicators like genes; the origination analogy states that novelty in human creativity emerges in a "blind" Darwinian manner; and the explanatory units of selection analogy states that memes …Read more
  •  353
    Philosophie der Lebenswissenschaften
    with Susanne Bauer, Lara Huber, Marie I. Kaiser, Lara Keuck, Ulrich Krohs, Peter McLaughlin, Kären Nickelson, Thomas Reydon, Neil Roughley, Christian Sachse, Marianne Schark, Georg Toepfer, Marcel Weber, and Markus Wild
    Information Philosophie 4 14-27. 2013.
    This paper summarizes (in German) recent tendencies in the philosophy of the life sciences.
  •  27
    This paper summarizes the results from the first European Advanced Seminar in the Philosophy of the Life Sciences, which was held at the Brocher Foundation in Hermance (Switzerland) 6-10 September 2011. The Advanced Seminar brought together philosophers of the life sciences to discuss the topic of "Causation and Disease." The search for causes of disease in the biomedical sciences, we argue on the basis of the contributions to this conference, has not resulted in a simplification and unification…Read more
  •  665
    “If there is nothing beyond the organic...”: Heredity and Culture at the Boundaries of Anthropology in the Work of Alfred L. Kroeber
    NTM Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Wissenschaften, Technik und Medizin 17 (2): 107-133. 2009.
    Continuing Franz Boas' work to establish anthropology as an academic discipline in the US at the turn of the twentieth century, Alfred L. Kroeber re-defined culture as a phenomenon sui generis. To achieve this he asked geneticists to enter into a coalition against hereditarian thoughts prevalent at that time in the US. The goal was to create space for anthropology as a separate discipline within academia, distinct from other disciplines. To this end he crossed the boundary separating anthropolog…Read more
  •  243
    Creativity naturalized
    Philosophical Quarterly 59 (237): 577-592. 2009.
    I argue that creativity is compatible with determinism and therefore with naturalistic explanation. I explore different kinds of novelty, corresponding with four distinct concepts of creativity – anthropological, historical, psychological and metaphysical. Psychological creativity incorporates originality and spontaneity. Taken together, these point to the independence of the creative mind from social learning, experience and previously acquired knowledge. This independence is nevertheless compa…Read more
  •  351
    How norms make causes
    International Journal of Epidemiology 43. 2014.
    This paper is on the problem of causal selection and comments on Collingwood's classic paper "The so-called idea of causation". It discusses the relevance of Collingwood’s control principle in contemporary life sciences and defends that it is not the ability to control, but the willingness to control that often biases us towards some rather than other causes of a phenomenon. Willingness to control is certainly only one principle that influences causal selection, but it is an important one. It sh…Read more
  •  357
    Die Evolutionspsychologie hat vor ungefähr 20 Jahren die Nachfolge der Soziobiologie angetreten und zieht seitdem gegen die angebliche Rückständigkeit der Sozialwissenschaften zu Felde. Der Gegenstand dieses Textes ist die Rückständigkeit der Evolutionspsychologie - Rückständigkeit in Bezug auf die Art und Weise, wie das Phänomen Kultur zugerichtet wird, um es dann, jenseits der Lippenbekenntnisse zur Kultur, als explanatorisch irrelevant zu ignorieren.
  •  327
    This article illustrates in which sense genetic determinism is still part of the contemporary interactionist consensus in medicine. Three dimensions of this consensus are discussed: kinds of causes, a continuum of traits ranging from monogenetic diseases to car accidents, and different kinds of determination due to different norms of reaction. On this basis, this article explicates in which sense the interactionist consensus presupposes the innate?acquired distinction. After a descriptive Part 1…Read more
  •  461
    Interdisciplinarity in Philosophy of Science
    Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 45 (1): 59-70. 2014.
    This paper examines various ways in which philosophy of science can be interdisciplinary. It aims to provide a map of relations between philosophy and sciences, some of which are interdisciplinary. Such a map should also inform discussions concerning the question “How much philosophy is there in the philosophy of science?” In Sect. 1, we distinguish between synoptic and collaborative interdisciplinarity. With respect to the latter, we furthermore distinguish between two kinds of reflective forms…Read more
  •  65
    Meme, Meme, Meme: Darwins Erben und die Kultur
    Philosophia Naturalis 46 (1): 36-60. 2009.
    Charles Darwin und seine Erben wendeten die Theorie der Evolution biologischer Arten auch auf Kultur an. Kultur evolviere wie die Natur auf Darwinistische Weise. Die sog. Memtheorie, vertreten von verschiedenen Autoren auf der Basis des Darwinistischen Genselektionismus, ist eine Spielart einer solchen analogen Anwendung. Dieser Artikel kritisiert drei zentrale Aussagen der Memtheorie: (i) dass es Einheiten der Kultur – Meme – gibt, die analog zu Genen zu verstehen sind, (ii) dass Meme, in Analo…Read more
  •  674
    Darwinian 'blind' hypothesis formation revisited
    Synthese 175 (2): 193--218. 2010.
    Over the last four decades arguments for and against the claim that creative hypothesis formation is based on Darwinian ‘blind’ variation have been put forward. This paper offers a new and systematic route through this long-lasting debate. It distinguishes between undirected, random, and unjustified variation, to prevent widespread confusions regarding the meaning of undirected variation. These misunderstandings concern Lamarckism, equiprobability, developmental constraints, and creative hypothe…Read more
  •  1506
    Reconstituting Phenomena
    In Mäki U., Votsis S., Ruphy S. & Schurz G. (eds.), Recent developments in the philosophy of science, Springer. pp. 169-182. 2015.
    In the face of causal complexity, scientists reconstitute phenomena in order to arrive at a more simplified and partial picture that ignores most of the 'bigger picture.' This paper will distinguish between two modes of reconstituting phenomena: one moving down to a level of greater decomposition (toward organizational parts of the original phenomenon), and one moving up to a level of greater abstraction (toward different differences regarding the phenomenon). The first aim of the paper is to il…Read more