Volume 63, Issue 4

The widely held belief that classical instrumental music has (or expresses) some kind of content - whether it is supposed to be some language-like meaning or some distinctive and possibly untranslatable musical content - is notoriously difficult to defend. One of the probably rather few promising options of analysing our experiences of hearing ‘content in music’ starts with the assumption that we, the listeners of music, endow the heard musical sequences with content. In the paper, I defend this anti-realism concerning musical content by spelling out the idea that due to the operation of our imagination we sometimes, in listening to music, undergo episodes of hearing-as - close relatives of the more familiar episodes of seeing-as. Drawing on Colin McGinn’s analysis of seeing-as, I develop the idea that an episode of hearing-as is a kind of hybrid mental phenomenon, a co-production of our imagination and our ‘plain hearing’ of musical parameters.

The traditional criteria for distinguishing philosophy from other disciplines have either proved too limited or too broad. Only in its method does philosophy differentiate itself from other disciplines. Philosophy’s point of departure is constituted by spontaneous convictions (intuitions), which, in a first step, need to be articulated through conceptual analysis and then, in a second step, need to be justified; the third step comprises critiquing other philosophers’ thoughts and defending against others’ critique. This article proposes several metaphilosophical theses: Intuitions are not a fundamental source of evidence for philosophical theses, but are instead themselves in need of justification. Consistency is more important than truth; the task of philosophy is to develop extensive and, at the same time, consistent theories about the conceptual background of experience.

In philosophy it is widely recognized that a person’s first-person perspective on his own thought and action is importantly different from the third-person perspective we may have on the thought and actions of other people. In daily life it is natural to ask someone what he is doing or what he thinks about something, on the assumption that he knows what he is doing or what he is thinking. Some philosophers, however, argue that it is impossible to speak of knowledge in this context because the idea of knowledge requires a kind of distance between subject and object, a distance that is not present in the first-person context. I argue that this denial of self-knowledge is a paradoxical conclusion that we can resist, while retaining what is distinctive about the first-person.

The only knowledge we have of our own minds is knowledge acquired in the same third-person way in which we acquire knowledge of other people’s beliefs and desires. True, when we say on the basis of reflection that we believe or desire this or that, it seldom makes sense to challenge what we say. Yet such statements are not expressions of self-knowledge. They have instead the character of avowals, expressing our commitment to think and act in appropriate ways. Such avowals do attest to an intimate relation we have to ourselves alone. But this self-relation does not consist in our being immediately acquainted with the contents of our own minds. It consists in the fact that we alone - no one else in our place - can commit ourselves to thinking and acting in various ways.

Kant famously characterizes our human understanding as a “spontaneous” faculty, but what can this mean? I criticize some recent interpretations of Kant’s claim and suggest that we can only understand what Kant means by “the spontaneity of understanding” if we recognize certain basic differences between how Kant conceived of cognition and how philosophers commonly think of it today. I go on to argue that Kant’s conception of cognition represents an appealing alternative to the unsatisfying options that contemporary ways of thinking seem to force on us.

After National Socialism had destroyed any tradition in the history of thought, humanities in post-war Germany answered by criticizing this tradition, initiating a number of projects in the field of the history of concept. Erich Rothacker and Carl Schmitt, both compromised by National Socialism, can be seen here as predecessors of Joachim Ritter and also of Hans-Georg Gadamer. The letters, of which there are only a few, display consensus as well as dissent between the writers.

Is it rational to believe in the existence of a God who is not only omnipotent (and omniscient) but also good or morally perfect? This is the famous Problem of Evil, the Theodicy problem. Unlike many theologians and philosophers who feel convinced of either the existence or the non-existence of a good God, I defend a sceptical view based on the following two assumptions: 1. The believers have so far not been able to show that all the evils of the world, for which God is responsible, are logically necessary means for the attainment of higher values. 2. The burden of proof - contrary to what many theologians say - lies clearly on the believers in God’s goodness and not on the non-believers. Insofar we have at present no sufficient reason to believe in a God who is not morally indifferent.