Robert Reimer

Diese Textbesprechung soll aus drei Abschnitten bestehen. Im ersten Abschnitt werde ich allgemein darauf eingehen, wie Kraatz die ersten beiden Charakterzüge der formalen Anzeige erschließt und definiert. Im zweiten Abschnitt werde ich kritisch beleuchten, wie laut Kraatz die Angst mit dem dritten Charakterzug der formalen Anzeige zusammenhängt und warum sie dem Verstehensprozess formal-anzeigender Begriffe zugrundeliegen soll. Im letzten Abschnitt werde ich noch kurz auf Teil V des Buches eingehen, worin es um die Einbettung der formalen Analyse in Heideggers allgemeine Bedeutungs- und Begriffstheorie geht.

The Vienna Circle was an influential group of philosophers in the early 20th century. Its members were dedicated to do philosophy and to conduct research in accordance with the guidelines of the scientific world-conception. For some of them, Oswald Spengler was a dangerous antagonist due to the success and influence of his metaphysical philosophy of history in Der Untergang des Abendlandes and other works. In this paper, I will explore systematically the Circle’s critical reception of Spengler regarding his methodological approaches, ontological positions, and political philosophy. I will, thereby, also evaluate the criticism brought forth against Spengler.

Die Zwischenkriegszeit des 20. Jahrhunderts war die Hochzeit der Kulturphilosophie. Ihre zentrale Forderung nach einer Trennung der Realwissenschaften in Naturund „Kulturwissenschaften“1 stand der Unternehmung zu einer Einheitswissenschaft des Wiener Kreises diametral entgegen. Auch Moritz Schlick sprach sich Zeit seines Lebens entschieden gegen die „mächtig emporgeblüht[e]“ Mode der „Kulturwissenschaften oder Geisteswissenschaften“ (Schlick, MSGA I/6, 535) aus. Dies geht beispielhaft aus seinem Vortrag über das Verhältnis von „Philosophie und Naturwissenschaft“ (Schlick, MSGA I/6, 521–545) hervor, in dem er ausführt, dass jene „Wissenschaften vom Menschlichen“ schlechthin nicht über eigene Grundbegriffe verfügten und deswegen stets auf die „ausgezeichnete Stellung des naturwissenschaftlichen Denkens“ angewiesen (Schlick, MSGA I/6, 536–538) blieben, namentlich auf die Psychologie als die „Brücke zur Geschichte und zu den Geisteswissenschaften überhaupt“ (Schlick, MSGA I/6, 525f.). Insofern könnten sie für sich nicht den Anspruch erheben, eine vom naturwissenschaftlichen „Weltbild“ verschiedene „Weltanschauung“ spekulativ zu entwerfen (Schlick, MSGA I/6, 541f.). Die Gegenstände der Kulturwissenschaften, so zeigt sich Schlick auch später noch überzeugt, seien letztlich psychologisch zu ergründende Handlungen von Menschen und stünden daher „nicht im absolutem Gegensatze […] zu den Gegenständen der Naturwissenschaften“

Since Benjamin Libet’s famous experiments in 1979, the study of the will has become a focal point in the cognitive sciences. Just like Libet the scien-tists Daniel Wegner and Thalia Wheatley came to doubt that the will is causally efficacious. In their influential study I Spy from 1999, they created an experi-mental setup to show that agents erroneously experience their actions as caused by their thoughts. Instead, these actions are caused by unconscious neural pro-cesses; the agent’s ‘causal experience of will’ is just an illusion. Both the scien-tific method and the conclusion drawn from the empirical results have already been criticized by philosophers. In this paper, I will analyze the action performed in I Spy and criticize more fundamentally the assumption of a ‘causal experience of will’. I will argue that the I Spy study does not show that the agent’s causal experience of will is illusory, because it does not show that there is a causal ex-perience of will. Against Wegner and Wheatley’s assumption, I will show that it is unlikely that the participants in I Spy experienced their conscious thoughts as causally efficacious for an action, that they did not perform at all. It is more likely, that they experienced their own bodily movement as causally efficacious for a cooperative action, that they did not perform solely by themselves.

In the 1980s, physiologist Benjamin Libet conducted a series of ex-periments to test whether the will is free. Whilst he originally assumed that the will functions like an immaterial initiator of cerebral processes culminating in actions, he later began to think that it rather works like an immaterial veto inhib-iting unwanted actions by preventing unconsciously initiated cerebral processes from unfolding. Libet’s veto was widely criticized for its Cartesian dualist and interactionist implications. However, in 2016, Schultze-Kraft et al. adopted Libet’s idea of an action-inhibiting veto and conducted a new experiment. Its goal was to test until which moment agents can inhibit an action that they already intended to do. Despite insisting on the material nature of the veto, the researchers also described the function of the veto in interactionist terms, namely as an act of the agent performed against her own cerebral processes. The purpose of this pa-per is to explain in which sense the veto in Libet’s and in Schultze-Kraft’s study is interactionist, and to provide a non-interactionist reinterpretation of the test subjects’ action inhibition in Schultze-Kraft’s experiment.

David Hume and other philosophers doubt that causality can be perceived directly. Instead, observers become aware of it through inference based on the perception of the two events constituting cause and effect of the causal relation. However, Hume and the other philosophers primarily consider causal relations in which one object triggers a motion or change in another. In this paper, I will argue against Hume’s assumption by distinguishing a kind of causal relations in which an agent is controlling the motion or change of an object. I will call this kind of causal relations ‘causation-as-control’. In instances of causation-as-control, the observer does not become aware of the causality through inference based on the perception of two events (cause and effect). Rather, she perceives the two events directly and without further inference as cause and effect of a causal relation, and, therefore, the causality at work.