Volume 63, Issue 6

The philosophical tradition reaching from antiquity up till the contemporary philosophy of mind had tended to conceive of the mind as something which is ‘contained’ in the head. In recent decades such cognitive internalism has been called into question by the ‘embodied cognition’ movement in the philosophy of mind. The interactionist critique of cognitive and epistemological internalism, however, is not new. As the authors demonstrate, Wilhelm Dilthey, especially in his texts from the 1880s, came up with a profound critique of internalism and was able to clearly recognise its solipsistic ramifications. Dilthey took a strong interactionist stance with regard to internalism and presented an interesting argument in favor of the objective reality of the external world. The authors reconstruct these arguments and demonstrate the closeness of Dilthey’s work to the philosophy of the American pragmatists as well as Dilthey’s possible influence on some of them.

This paper explores Schelling’s theory of phenomenal consciousness in the System of Transcendental Idealism. It is shown that Schelling’s description and explanation of phenomenal consciousness is in accord with contemporary self-representationalist accounts of phenomenal consciousness. Thus, it is argued that Schelling develops a self-representationalist approach of phenomenal consciousness. Furthermore, it is demonstrated on the basis of Schelling’s account that analytic self-representationalism fails to completely explain phenomenal consciousness. Finally, however, a fundamental critique of Schelling’s theory of phenomenal consciousness is presented. Thus the central theses of the paper are, on the one hand, that Schelling is of systematic importance for contemporary debates, on the other hand, that his account is not convincing.

The question posed in this paper is in what sense we should say that our judgments about works of art can claim to be objective. It draws upon recent discussions in analytical aesthetics on the one hand and on the work of Hegel, Gadamer and McDowell on the other. The aim of the paper is to argue for the possibility of an objectivistic understanding of judgments on works of art. It does so by trying to render the foundations of subjective accounts of such judgments problematic and by trying to show that the difference between objective and mere intersubjective claims of judgments isn’t a valid difference at all.

According to Dewey, normative criteria are a part of the social process and insofar a process themselves. These criteria have to be reflected and reformulated in new situations in which new social problems occur. The democratic public is in this conception the realm in which a common elucidation of problematic social consequences of the existing institutions takes place and in which proposals for the overcoming of these consequences are formulated. Thereby it reconstructs the central norms embedded within the social institutions and shows how collective actions guided by these norms leads to problematic social consequences. This is then the background for a critical reflection on and a reformulation of the guiding norms of these institutions. To realize such a form of collective self-determination the democratic public has to be extended to all forms of social cooperation.

This article aims at developing an account of John Dewey’s empirical naturalism by focusing on what he regards as “Darwin’s influence on philosophy.” If Dewey’s lifelong engagement with Darwinist themes and arguments is taken into consideration, it becomes clear that Darwinism not only motivates him to drop substantialist assumptions about nature and experience and to challenge the relationalist attitude at the root of most of modern science, but also to opt for a processualist disposition already at work in Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. What results is not a departure from all metaphysical speculation, but the hypothesis of a naturalist metaphysics that can do justice to what is implied in the Darwinian turn in science.

Dewey’s pragmatism and John McDowell’s philosophy of language share central concerns. They defend a naturalistic vision of the mind (“second nature”) and rely on the concept of experience in order to articulate the contact between mind and world. They differ, though, in their understanding of how the human mind can relate spontaneously to itself and to the world. McDowell links this freedom exclusively to language with the consequence of detaching it from any reflexive determination, turning it into an abstract given. Dewey, by contrast, develops a practice-oriented understanding of freedom and understanding as an essentially precarious cultural form. This allows him to incorporate the reflexive dimension of mental operatiwons, of which McDowell takes no account: It makes a practical difference how the human being conceives its own nature and its own mind.

In the present letter from Shanghai the German indologist and logician Eberhard Guhe writes about his situation as an associate professor at Fudan University/ Shanghai. The School of Philosophy, where he teaches Sanskrit, modern logic and Indian philosophy, appears to be an ideal place for him to pursue his interdisciplinary interests in the realm of Indian and modern logic. He is particularly impressed by the students’ commitment to his Sanskrit classes, something which one hardly experiences in Germany anymore. Moreover, he enjoys the international atmosphere at the university, the moderate teaching obligations and the advantage of being largely exempted from administrative agenda.