Publications

New releases

Is There a Defensible Conception of Reflective Equilibrium?
Claus Beisbart, Georg Brun

Synthese, 2024

The goal of this paper is to re-assess reflective equilibrium (“RE”). We ask whether there is a conception of RE that can be defended against the various objections that have been raised against RE in the literature. To answer this question, we provide a systematic overview of the main objections, and for each objection, we investigate why it looks plausible, on what standard or expectation it is based, how it can be answered and which features RE must have to meet the objection. We find that there is a conception of RE that promises to withstand all objections. However, this conception has some features that may be unexpected: it aims at a justification that is tailored to understanding and it is neither tied to intuitions nor does it imply coherentism. We conclude by pointing out a cluster of questions we think RE theorists should pay more attention to.

 

Was heißt hier noch real?
Claus Beisbart
Reclam, 2024


Wie viel Wirklichkeit wollen wir?
Virtuelle Realität zwischen Utopie und Weltflucht

Unser Zugang zur Wirklichkeit wird zunehmend durch Computer geprägt. Denn mit Hilfe von Computersimulationen lässt sich virtuelle Realität (VR) erzeugen. VR hilft in der Forschung, das Wissen zu erweitern. Sie wird in der Ausbildung eingesetzt, um medizinische Eingriffe oder das Lenken eines Flugzeugs zu üben. Schließlich verschafft sie uns in Spielen Erlebnisse, die in der bekannten Realität kaum zu haben sind. Letztlich können wir aber nur dann von VR profitieren, wenn wir wirklich verstehen, was sie ist und wie sie entsteht. Und wir müssen uns ebenso darüber klarwerden, ob der Aufenthalt in ihr unser Leben wirklich besser macht. Denn von virtuellem Brot allein können wir nicht leben. Müssen wir also auch der Original Reality (OR) treu bleiben?
»Von virtuellem Brot allein können wir nicht leben. Wir dürfen die Virtuelle Realität genießen, doch die Originale Realität hat Priorität. In diesem Sinne gilt: Bleibt der Originalen Realität treu!«

 

Warum wir eine Erbschaftssteuer brauchen
Eine philosophische Verteidigung
Marcel Twele
De Gruyter, 2023

In der vorliegenden Arbeit wird eine normative Analyse und Verteidigung der Erbschaftssteuer unternommen. Zunächst wird eine egalitaristische Argumentation für die Steuer entfaltet. Aufgrund ihrer progressiven Struktur ist die Erbschaftssteuer ein geeignetes Instrument, um der wachsenden ökonomischen Ungleichheit entgegenzuwirken und letztlich verschiedene egalitäre Ideale (politische Gleichheit, Chancengleicheit etc.) zu befördern. Anschließend wird untersucht, wie aus normativer Perspektive zu beurteilen ist, dass der Erblasser bei Erhebung der Steuer nicht mehr lebt. Die restliche Arbeit besteht in einer Auseinandersetzung mit den wichtigsten Einwänden gegen die Erbschaftssteuer. So wird oft behauptet, diese verletze die natürlichen Eigentumsrechte des Erblassers bzw. des Erben und sie ignoriere zudem die Verdienstansprüche des Erblassers. Schließlich sei die Steuer aus diversen „familien-basierten" Erwägungen abzulehnen. Nicht nur werden diese Einwände erfolgreich zurückgewiesen; ferner wird gezeigt, dass einige der, diesen Argumenten zugrundeliegenden, Prinzipien selbst zur Verteidigung einer egalitären Erbschaftssteuer (also einer Erbschaftssteuer, die aus egalitären Prinzipien folgt) herangezogen werden können.

 

The Dworkin–Williams debate: Liberty, conceptual integrity, and tragic conflict in politics
Matthieu Queloz
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 2023

Bernard Williams articulated his later political philosophy notably in response to Ronald Dworkin, who, striving for coherence or integrity among our political concepts, sought to immunize the concepts of liberty and equality against conflict. Williams, doubtful that we either could or should eliminate the conflict, resisted the pursuit of conceptual integrity. Here, I reconstruct this Dworkin–Williams debate with an eye to drawing out ideas of ongoing philosophical and political importance. The debate not only exemplifies Williams's political realism and its connection to his critique of the morality system. It also illustrates the virtues and hazards of contemporary efforts to ameliorate or engineer our concepts; it indicates what political philosophy might look to in appraising political concepts; it adverts to the different needs these concepts have to meet if they are to sustain a politics of pluralism, deal with polarization, and secure the consent of those who end up on the losing side of political decisions; and it presents us with two starkly contrasting conceptions of politics itself, of the place of political values within it, and of our prospects of reducing the uncomfortably conflictual character of those values through philosophy.

Kritische Selbstreflexion, vernünftige Meinungsbildung und argumentative Kompetenzen
Georg Brun, Dominique Kuenzle
Vienna University Press, 2023

Es ist unbestritten, dass kritische Selbstreflexion und vernünftige Meinungsbildung zu den allgemeinen Bildungszielen gehören. Argumentative Fähigkeiten sind dafür unerlässlich, weil sie immer eine wesentliche Rolle spielen, wenn es darum geht, ein Sachgebiet anhand einer Theorie zu verstehen. Der Beitrag zeigt dies unter Rückgriff auf die erkenntnistheoretische Idee des Überlegungsgleichgewichts, illustriert die Funktion argumentativer Fähigkeiten am Beispiel des anthropogenen Klimawandels und schlägt einige institutionelle und curriculare Konsequenzen vor.

 

Logical Forms. Validity and Variety of Formalizations
Georg Brun
Logic and Logical Philosophy, 2023

Formalizations in first-order logic are standardly used to represent logical forms of sentences and to show the validity of ordinary-language arguments. Since every sentence admits of a variety of formalizations, a challenge arises: why should one valid formalization suffice to show validity even if there are other, invalid, formalizations? This paper suggests an explanation with reference to criteria of adequacy which ensure that formalizations are related in a hierarchy of more or less specific formalizations. This proposal is then compared with stronger criteria and assumptions, especially the idea that sentences essentially have just one logical form.

 

Portrait von Nietzsche

Virtue Ethics and the Morality System
Matthieu Queloz, Marcel van Ackeren
Topoi, 2023

Virtue ethics is frequently billed as a remedy to the problems of deontological and consequentialist ethics that Bernard Williams identified in his critique of “the morality system.” But how far can virtue ethics be relied upon to avoid these problems? What does Williams’s critique of the morality system mean for virtue ethics? To answer this question, we offer a more principled characterisation of the defining features of the morality system in terms of its organising ambition—to shelter life against luck. This reveals the system to be multiply realisable: the same function can be served by substantively different but functionally equivalent ideas. After identifying four requirements that ethical thought must meet to function as a morality system, we show that they can also be met by certain constellations of virtue-ethical ideas, including notably Stoicism. We thereby demonstrate the possibility of virtue-ethical morality systems raising problems analogous to those besetting their deontological and consequentialist counterparts. This not only widens the scope of Williams’s critique and brings out the cautionary aspect of his legacy for virtue ethics; it also offers contemporary virtue ethicists a more principled understanding of the functional features that mark out morality systems and lie at the root of their problems, thereby helping them avoid or overcome these problems.

 

Buchcover

The Life Worth Living in Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy
David Machek
Cambridge University Press, 2023

The account of the best life for humans – i.e. a happy or flourishing life – and what it might consist of was the central theme of ancient ethics. But what does it take to have a life that, if not happy, is at least worth living, compared with being dead or never having come into life? This question was also much discussed in antiquity, and David Machek's book reconstructs, for the first time, philosophical engagements with the question from Socrates to Plotinus. Machek's comprehensive book explores ancient views on a life worth living against a background of the pessimistic outlook on the human condition which was adopted by the Greek poets, and also shows the continuities and contrasts between the ancient perspective and modern philosophical debates about biomedical ethics and the ethics of procreation. His rich study of this relatively neglected theme offers a fresh and compelling narrative of ancient ethics.

 

Gesplitterte Glasscheibe vor schwarzem Hintergrund

Potentialism and S5
Jonas Werner
Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 2023

Modal potentialism as proposed by Barbara Vetter (2015) is the view that every possibility is grounded in something having a potentiality. Drawing from work by Jessica Leech (2017), Samuel Kimpton-Nye (2021) argues that potentialists can have an S5 modal logic. I present a novel argument to the conclusion that the most straightforward way of spelling out modal potentialism cannot validate an S5 modal logic. Then I will propose a slightly tweaked version of modal potentialism that can validate an S5 modal logic and still does justice to the core claim of potentialism.

 

Publications and lectures