•  10
    The Force of an Idea: New Essays on Christian Wolff's Psychology (edited book)
    with Saulo de Freitas Araujo and Thiago Constâncio Ribeiro Pereira
    Springer. 2021.
    This book presents, for the first time in English, a comprehensive anthology of essays on Christian Wolff's psychology written by leading international scholars. Christian Wolff is one of the towering figures in 18th-century Western thought. In the last decades, the publication of Wolff's Gesammelte Werke by Jean École and collaborators has aroused new interest in his ideas, but the meaning, scope, and impact of his psychological program have remained open to close and comprehensive analysis and…Read more
  •  5
    Guest editors’ introduction
    Theoria: Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de la Ciencia 34 (3): 317-320. 2019.
  •  4
    Scientific innovation
    Theoria: Revista de Teoría, Historia y Fundamentos de la Ciencia 34 (3): 321-341. 2019.
    I offer an analysis of the concept of scientific innovation. When research is innovated, highly novel and useful elements of investigation begin to spread through a scientific community, resulting from a process which is neither due to blind chance nor to necessity, but to a minimal use of rationality. This, however, leads to tension between two claims: (1) scientific innovation can be explained rationally; (2) no existing account of rationality explains scientific innovation. There are good rea…Read more
  •  51
    Kant on the Ends of the Sciences
    Kant Studien 111 (1): 1-28. 2020.
    Kant speaks repeatedly about the relations between ends or aims and scientific research, but the topic has mostly been ignored. What is the role of ends, especially (though not exclusively) practical ones, in his views on science? I will show that while Kant leaves ample space for recognizing a function of ends both in the definition and the pursuit of inquiry, and in the further practical application of scientific cognition, he does not claim that science is simply an instrument for achieving p…Read more
  •  379
    A Kantian Puzzle
    Surprise – 127 Variations on the Unexpected. 2019.
  •  19
    It is often claimed that formal and optimizing norms of the standard conception of rationality and the heuristics of the bounded rationality approach are at odds with one another. This claim, I arg...
  • Misuse of the FDA's humanitarian device exemption in deep brain stimulation for obsessive-compulsive disorder
    with T. E. Fins, J. J. Mayberg, H. S. Nuttin, B. Kubu, C. S. Galert, V. Stoppenbrink, K. Merkel, R. Schlaepfer, and Katja Stoppenbrink
    HealthAffairs 30 (2): 302-311. 2011.
    Deep brain stimulation — a novel surgical procedure — is emerging as a treatment of last resort for people diagnosed with neuropsychiatric disorders such as severe obsessive-compulsive disorder. The US Food and Drug Administration granted a so-called humanitarian device exemption to allow patients to access this intervention, thereby removing the requirement for a clinical trial of the appropriate size and statistical power. Bypassing the rigors of such trials puts patients at risk, limits oppor…Read more
  •  182
    The “Rationality Wars” in Psychology: Where They Are and Where They Could Go
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 55 (1): 66-81. 2012.
    Current psychology of human reasoning is divided into several different approaches. For instance, there is a major dispute over the question whether human beings are able to apply norms of the formal models of rationality such as rules of logic, or probability and decision theory, correctly. While researchers following the “heuristics and biases” approach argue that we deviate systematically from these norms, and so are perhaps deeply irrational, defenders of the “bounded rationality” approach t…Read more
  •  14
    Wie können wir von Kant lernen?
    Das Achtzehnte Jahrhundert 30 89-95. 2006.
  •  32
    Manfred Kuehn: Kant - A Biography (review)
    Philosophical Quarterly 54 (216): 476-479. 2004.
    Review of Manfred Kuehn's outstanding biography on Immanuel Kant. A critical point I raise concerns Kuehn's discussion of Kant's relation to Hume. Scholars are divided over the questions of (a) whether Hume was an actual inspiration for Kant’s Critical philosophy, (b) whether Kant’s defense really addresses Hume’s problem of causality, and, of course, (c) whether Kant’s arguments provide a satisfactory solution to the problem. Sometimes these questions are not clearly distinguished by interpret…Read more
  •  12
    Der elektronische Kant: Neue CD-ROMs zu Kants Schriften (review)
    Kant Studien 90 107-110. 1999.
    A review of electronic versions of writings by Kant's: first, a CD-Rom containing central parts of the Academy edition; second, an edition containing next to central works by Kant also texts by Locke, Berkeley and Hume. Both editions are useful and complement each other, although for scholarly purposes the electronic version of the Academy edition is to be preferred.
  •  15
    The article reports discussions at an international conference of leading Kant scholars held at the University of Marburg (Germany) in 1998. The conference was concerned with both the current state and the need for revisions of the Academy edition of Kant's Gesammelte Schriften as well. As became clear, a complete revision is necessary in the case of Vols. XX-XXIV and XXVII-XXIX, since these can hardly be used for research. Improvements of various extent and content should be attempted in other …Read more
  •  140
    Why Does History Matter to Philosophy and the Sciences?: Selected Essays (edited book)
    with Lorenz Krüger, Wolfgang Carl, and Lorraine Daston
    Walter DeGruyter. 2005.
    What are the relationships between philosophy and the history of philosophy, the history of science and the philosophy of science? This selection of essays by Lorenz Krüger (1932-1994) presents exemplary studies on the philosophy of John Locke and Immanuel Kant, on the history of physics and on the scope and limitations of scientific explanation, and a realistic understanding of science and truth. In his treatment of leading currents in 20th century philosophy, Krüger presents new and original …Read more
  •  3
    Review: Sacks, Insight and Objectivity (review)
    Kant Studien 97 239-243. 2006.
    I criticize Sacks' ambitious work on objectivity and its history in modern philosophy in three main regards: First, Sacks tends to oversimplify the different views of Descartes, Locke, and Hume, which are not all haunted in the same sense by a "subject-driven skepticism". Second, Kant's conception of objectivity isn't directed (primarily) at refuting external world skepticism. Third, Sacks assumes that it is clear what transcendental idealism is: a doctrine that asserts an ontological distinctio…Read more
  •  118
    In his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Kant formulates the idea of the empirical investigation of the human being as a free agent. The notion is puzzling: Does Kant not often claim that, from an empirical point of view, human beings cannot be considered as free? What sense would it make anyway to include the notion of freedom in science? The answer to these questions lies in Kant’s notion of character. While probably all concepts of character are involved in the description and expl…Read more
  •  22
    Kant über die dreifache Beziehung zwischen den Wissenschaften und der Philosophie
    Internationales Jahrbuch des Deutschen Idealismus / International Yearbook of German Idealism 8 60-82. 2011.
  •  113
    This essay reconsiders Kant's denial of scientific status to the discipline of empirical psychology, which have often been viewed as quite problematic. In the preface to the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, Kant denies that psychology can be natural science proper. I argue that Kant's impossibility claim is based on a very specific conception of science that he did not put forward elsewhere, and that is restricted to *natural* sciences in any case. Also, Kant's critical remarks are d…Read more
  •  76
    This book explores Kant's philosophy of the human sciences, their status, their relations and prospects. Contrary to widespread belief, he is not dogmatic about the question of whether these disciplines are proper sciences. Instead, this depends on whether we can rationally adjust assumptions about the methods, goals, and subject matter of these disciplines - and this has to be done alongside of ongoing research. Kant applies these ideas especially in lectures on "pragmatic antropology" given fr…Read more
  •  100
    Consciousness regained? Philosophical arguments for and against reductive physicalism
    Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience 14 (1): 55-63. 2012.
    This paper is an overview of recent discussions concerning the mind–body problem that have been taking place at the interface between philosophy and neuroscience. In it I focus on phenomenal consciousness or “qualia”, which I distinguish from various related issues (sections 1-2). I then discuss various influential skeptical arguments that question the possibility of reductive explanations of qualia in physicalist terms: knowledge arguments, conceivability arguments, the argument from multiple r…Read more
  •  24
    Margaret S. Archer, Being Human: The Problem of Agency (review)
    Metapsychology 5 (46). 2001.
    A review which, among other criticisms of Archer's book, discusses some philosophical problems concerning talk of the "self" in the human sciences.
  •  34
    Common opinion ascribes to Immanuel Kant the view that psychology cannot become a science properly so called, because it cannot be mathematized. It is equally common to claim that this reflects the state of the art of his times; that the quantification of the mind was not achieved during the eighteenth century, while it was so during the nineteenth century; or that Kant's so-called “impossibility claim” was refuted by nineteenth-century developments, which in turn opened one path for psychology …Read more
  •  1
    Kant in context, works on CD-ROM for Windows
    Kant Studien 90 (1): 107-110. 1999.