Volume 64, Issue 1

This paper discusses the question of the role played by concepts in human cognition, perception and action. Taking recourse to Heidegger’s Zeug analysis, it defends the thesis that all human experience is perfused with concepts, though without necessarily being propositionally or linguistically structured. Heidegger’s analysis is used to express a non-linguistical version of the conceptuality thesis, and to differentiate between linguistic and practical modes of commanding a concept.

In the following article three theses of Beckermann (2012) will be critically discussed. According to the first thesis, natural sciences are open to the investigation of supernatural phenomena, though to date there is no substantial evidence for these phenomena. Secondly, the first-person perspective can be considered by naturalism without loss of meaning. Thirdly, the scientific worldview is seen as an improvement of the manifest view of the world.

In recent decades, the courts, particularly on a transnational level, seem to have adopted a law-making function that was traditionally exclusive to parliaments. This trend is often problematised as a hollowing-out of democracy. By focusing on the right to legal action and on claimants, instead of on adjudication, this article suggests that a different assessment is in order. It draws on the assumption that there is a normative connection between law and democracy (as made explicit by Jürgen Habermas and Ingeborg Maus); and yet it argues that precisely because legal action remains largely unconsidered, contemporary theories of democracy fail to embrace an important shift from a legalistic version towards a fully procedural version of the rule of law. In defending this position, however, it is necessary to question the tendency of the German legal tradition to give substantive law priority over the procedural position of individuals. By turning to Bernhard Windscheid’s concept of a claim or title ( Anspruch ), it will be argued that the potential of subjective rights remains unexplored as long as its core element – the right to legal action – is underestimated. The article suggests that, in fact, taking legal action can at times unfold its own “counter-politics,” which matters for democracy.

This paper discusses trust as a condition of the possibility of enlightenment. It claims that trust matters for the capacity to accept rather than to justify beliefs. This view is defended against the background of a functional approach to trust according to which it is by virtue of trust that people may enter into and sustain stable, potentially reflexive, and affirmative relations to all kinds of relata, not exclusively other people. All in all, a distinction between two theoretical layers is proposed: a transcendental-philosophical layer which examines whether trust is a condition of epistemic action, and a normative layer which discusses the problems of the justification of trust. This distinction, it is argued, is crucial to defending the ideal of enlightenment, or epistemic autonomy: before one can discuss problems of the justification of trust, trust is to be understood as a condition of the possibility of acting or, in epistemic contexts, of accepting beliefs.

To say that trustworthiness is the formal object of trust is to claim that trust is an intentional attitude that is determined in its mode and made intelligible by the fact that the trusting person ascribes to the person she trusts the property of being trustworthy with regard to the good entrusted to her. This view is attractive because it seems to offer an easy way to characterise trust as a specific attitude, and it opens up a perspective regarding the place of trust in practical reason. This paper argues against this view. It is claimed that trustworthiness is a social status. Where people are recognised as trustworthy, you can rely on them rather than having to trust them.

One reason that trust is interesting for philosophers is that there are reasons for trust. We want to know when it is appropriate to trust other people, because trusting foolishly can be dangerous. The paper argues that there are two competing ways of understanding reasons of trust – a non-voluntarist and a voluntarist way. On the non-voluntarist picture, reasons for trust are associated with the trustworthiness of another person. On the voluntarist picture, you can appropriately trust another person without judging her to be trustworthy. In the paper a case is made against the voluntarist interpretation. At the same time it is argued that non-voluntarist theories of trust are faced with a particular problem. This problem has to do with the assumption that in order to appropriately trust another person you have to judge her competent in the relevant area of interaction. It is argued that this competence assumption should not be understood as a necessary condition for trustworthiness but rather as a necessary condition for mere reliability. Doing so helps to solve problems associated with trust in medicine ethics and political philosophy, and it opens up new perspectives for theories of trust.