Volume 3, Issue 1

Die Vernunft verfügt bei Kant über ein ihr eigentümliches Interesse, durch das sie sich vom Verstand unterscheidet. Das Interesse der Vernunft richtet sich des näheren auf den metaphysischen „Übergang“ zwischen einer bedingten und einer unbedingten Erkenntnis. Im Ausgang von diesem metaphysischen Vernunftinteresse unternimmt Kant eine transzendentale Neubestimmung des Wahrheitsbegriffs, bei der er sich kritisch von einem „objektivistischen“ und einem „intellektualistischen“ Wahrheitsbegriff absetzt.

This paper examines the various Liar paradoxes and their near kin, Grelling's paradox and Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem. All are found to spring from circular definition – whether of statements, predicates, or sentences – a manoeuvre that generates the fatal disorders of the Liar syndrome: semantic vacuity, semantic incoherence, and predicative catalepsy. Afflicted statements, such as the Liar statement, fail to be genuine statements, and hence say nothing – a point that invalidates the arguments on which the various paradoxes rest. Formal systems are found to require disambiguators to distinguish the pseudostatements from their genuine doubles. Gödel's Theorem is shown to be fallacious, and measures are proposed to correct the conceptual mistakes on which it is based.

Two main theories of emotional affectivity exist in the modern philosophy of emotion: sensationalism and ‘cognitivism’. The fundamental dispute between these theories concerns the question of whether feeling merely accompanies the evaluative content of emotion or is directed toward it. I reject both sensationalism and cognitivism as general theories of emotional affectivity. Instead, I propose a twolevel account of emotional affectivity that allows both theories their proper due. We must distinguish between feelings with primitive and full-fledged intentionality. Both involve a sense and a reference to an object, but only the latter exhibits experiential directedness toward an object. Primitively intentional first-order feelings emerge as analog representations of changes in one's organismic and/or attitudinal mental state. They amount to a hedonically valenced experience of one's own state, as the sensationalist view suggests. Second-order feelings with full-fledged intentionality emerge when a ‘pure’ feeling is interpreted and categorized in terms of the evaluative content of one's present emotion. They are feelings toward the object of one's emotion, as the cognitivist theory holds.

This paper aims to clarify an important distinction which is lingering within Hans-Georg Gadamer's words on authority, and is necessary for making his attempt at rehabilitation of authority viable. This is the distinction between genuine authority and formal authority. The importance of this distinction is further explicated with reference to the famous Milgram-experiment on obedience to authority.

This article is an attempt to sketch the outline of a philosophy of science which avoids the traditional battle zone between realism and constructivism by drawing attention to parallels between modern debates in philosophy of science and themes from classical history of philosophy. I argue that the main problem with these theories is, that they at best can only offer us a metaphorical image of a world which has been made known to us in e.g. science. They can not tell us anything substantial about how we obtain new knowledge about the world. By focusing on a dynamic view on the things in the world notably in the scientific experiment, we might get a more fruitful approach to the multiple ways in which we interact with the world and thus avoid some of the traditional dichotomies of philosophy of science, for instance between nature and society and between things and signs.

A challenging theme for reflection after the Holocaust is victimhood. There is a presumed but rather unexplored connection between victimhood and intrinsic evil. This essay wants to contribute to the clarification of the concept of being a victim, with special regard to intrinsic evil. Current notions turn out to be impregnated with religious, legalistic and moralistic connotations that express non-victim perspectives. The essay proposes that the concept of being a victim should be interpreted from a victim perspective, which would yield a concept that makes victimhood a possibly universal intrinsic evil. Such a concept, it is suggested, should focus on severe injury in combination with drastically reduced agency in respect to the injury in question.