Band 8, Heft 1

In this paper, I argue that the conceptual changes that occurred in the structure of physical knowledge during the second half of the 19 th century, are reflected by the concept of the “primary ideal object” (PIO) and its implicit definition within appropriate systems of statements, called a “nucleus of a branch of physics” (NBP). Within an NBP focus shifts away from discovering “law of nature” to observations of a physical object (system) and its states, while the distinct notion of “measurable” replaces the vague notion “observable”. On the basis of this notion, the roles of physical models and measurements within physics, different kinds of work, experiments, and laws are discussed. Next follows a discussion of different levels of change in science, after which this distinction is compared to Kuhn's model. Finally, I present a new combination of “realism” and “constructivism”, which differs from both the “constructive empiricism” of van Fraassen and from different “empirical realisms”.

One of the conceptual events that distinguish the contemporary, post-Hegelian philosophy is the emergence of the concept of repetition as an independent and crucial concept. Marx, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Freud and, later on, Lacan and Deleuze – with all these thinkers the conceptual stakes of repetition are very much in the center of their projects. There are important differences between these projects, but what they all share is that repetition is viewed, posited, and elaborated as fundamentally different from the logic of representation. The paper starts with a brief overview of Marx's reflections of the repetition in relationship to revolution (from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte), and then focuses mainly on Deleuze and Lacan, on similarities and differences of their conceptualizations. For Deleuze, repetition as existing beyond representation constitutes an emancipatory realization of Being qua difference. For Lacan, repetition constitutes the other side of representation and cannot be completely separated form it, in spite of their radical heterogeneity. It is related to the contingency involved in the very constitution of the subject.

In this paper we examine the nature of the alleged realism of Cubism. We start by referring to the unsatisfactory characterisations of the so-called analytic and synthetic periods of Cubism. In our view, a fruitful clue for at least philosophically better understanding of Cubism is found in connecting the efforts of the Cubists to the aims of phenomenology and semantics. For the Cubists this implied creating a method of showing the conceptual (intensional) elements of the picture in the picture itself. Philosophically this entailed a close connection to the problems of intensionality and “inner truth” of any representation. Furthermore, we try to show that the efforts of the Cubists can be seen in the light of the Wittgensteinian distinction between “showing” and “saying”. Realising a parallelism in this connection reveals the specific contribution of the Cubists, viz., their explicit assimilation of “saying” by showing visually the conceptual conditions concerning the subject of a painting. Interestingly enough, Picasso too seems to have used the very same words explicitly (as is seen in our title), if not being fully or at all aware of their role in philosophical discussions. Anyway, the clarification of the philosophical contribution of Cubism will be aided by both of our source ideas: noematic conceptualisation, on the one hand, and the distinction between showing – saying for semantics, on the other.

In this paper, my major concern is to place the ethical remarks of Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus within a wider discussion in moral philosophy. In the first part of the paper, I sketch a reading of the Tractatus that brings out a particular feature of ethics, namely the fact that ethical discourse is shaped by both subjective and objective concerns. Moving on, I unfold the subjective side of ethics by drawing on Stanley Cavell's notion of the point of an utterance, while the objective side will be presented via Diamond's writing on the importance of truth in ethics. My goal is to argue for the possibility of an understanding of ethics that does not force a choice between the subjective and the objective, between realism and projectionism in moral philosophy, but allows for the possibility that both elements play a vital role in ethics.

An account of the widely accepted but vague idea that all humans have equal value is sketched. The essay evolves from a concept of inherent value as distinct from final, instrumental, and preconditional value. There is no supervenience base to inherent human value, it is argued. Still, it can be characterized, namely in terms of being worth loving. An account can also be given of its constitution, which would be by the agape-like love of an ideal observer faced with human beings in their wholeness. And its function as a master value of ethics can be analyzed; this is shown to depend on an essential bond with the value of human life.

This paper is divided into three main topics: 1) Habermas makes usage of the liberal vs. republican models of democracy in order to reconstruct the basic rights which are part of both democratic and human rights. To what extent are the human rights justifiable by a reconstructive approach? 2) The Habermas-Apel debate will be brought forward in the two last parts. Within the Apelian approach, the human rights may be reflexively justified, but within the Habermasian one, they are left to a discursive justification. The discursive conditions of practical discourses are, further on, considered to be ‘neutral’ by being procedural. The human rights may, analogously, seem to get a ‘neutral, procedural foundation’ within the Habermasian approach. A discursive justification, however, will not be able to accomplish a strong justification of the human rights, and according to Apel, both a stronger reflexive justification and a weaker discursive one will have to rest on meta-normative presuppositions. In which sense are these meta-norms ‘neutral’, and in which sense are they based upon modern-liberal presuppositions? 3) The last part turns to dilemmas linked to specific human rights, such as the freedom of speech vs. freedom of religion. To what extent are these kinds of dilemmas resolvable by Apelian (reflexive) and Habermasian (discursive, procedural) means?

It has been claimed that the only way to avoid action at a temporal distance in a temporal continuum is if effects occur simultaneously with their causes, and that in fact Newton's second law of motion illustrates that they truly are simultaneous. Firstly, I point out that this interpretation of Newton's second law is problematic because in classical mechanics ‘acceleration’ denotes a scalar vector. It is controversial whether scalar vectors themselves are changes as opposed to properties of a change, and therefore if they can count as effects. Secondly, I argue that the problem of action at a temporal distance is generated by the assumption that forces operate on their effects, but that this assumption is not easily reconciled with Newton's third law of motion, which is best read as saying that forces operate between objects. On that reading, there is no problem of action at a temporal distance even in a temporal continuum just as long as interacting objects coexist.

The subject of the article is the relationship between life and thought in a metaphilosophical perspective. It aims to show that German idealism, in a way that is still relevant but has previously not been sufficiently recognized, principally ties together both parts of the relationship, and, furthermore, that the shift in philosophy from idealism to post-idealism is not as abrupt as it is widely assumed to be. Friedrich Schlegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher are taken to represent German idealism, and Martin Heidegger is taken to represent post-idealism. First, reconstruction is made of an idea that is basic for the philosophy of Schlegel and Schleiermacher, namely, the idea of ‘natural’, pre-theoretical thought or interpretation that is spontaneously generated in human life and is principally independent of ‘artificial’, in a broad sense scientific, philosophy. The latter is in part an explication of ‘natural philosophy’. Second, this idea is compared with a very similar one, developed by Heidegger. Aspects that distinguish Heidegger from his predecessors are identified on the one hand as a theory of meaning, and on the other as the lack of a ‘reason of conscious life’.

Simon Blackburn's supervenience argument against moral realism has been widely discussed since its first appearance more than thirty years ago. A number of different suggestions have been made as to how the argument can be countered. In a review of Blackburn's Spreading the Word, Crispin Wright comments on the argument and rather briefly points out some technical difficulties with it that arise from the formula used in the definition of supervenience. In this paper, I try to show, building on Wright's criticism and taking a number of new objections into consideration, that the Moorean realist can meet Blackburn's explanatory charge.