Publikationen

The Normativity of Friendship
Anna Goppel
The Monist, April 2025

It is widely accepted that friendship affects the evaluation of our behavior. In virtue of friendship, acts and omissions may be variously allowed, forbidden, required, or otherwise considered better or worse. Typically it is taken for granted that such changes concern the moral evaluation of our behavior. This paper challenges this assumption. I argue that friendship involves nonmoral duties of benevolence, and is thus governed by a distinct normativity that includes moral and nonmoral duties. In this respect friendship alters the normative evaluation of our behavior, but not the moral evaluation. Such an understanding, I argue, accounts better than its purely moral alternative for how we think about important phenomena related to friendship, and can be well explained theoretically.

Handbuch Philosophie des Geistes
Vera Hoffmann-Kolss, Nicole Rathgeb (Hg.)
Springer, 2024

Welchen Status haben mentale Zustände, wie bewusste Empfindungen, Wünsche, Überzeugungen oder Emotionen, in einer physikalischen Welt? Lassen sich alle derartigen Zustände auf Hirnzustände reduzieren? Was genau zeichnet mentale Zustände aus, und was können wir über die mentalen Zustände unserer Mitmenschen wissen?

Dieses Handbuch liefert einen systematischen Überblick über Positionen und Fragestellungen in der Philosophie des Geistes. Ein zentrales Themengebiet ist dabei das Verhältnis zwischen mentalen Zuständen und Hirnzuständen: physikalistische und nicht-physikalistische Ansätze sowie das Problem der mentalen Verursachung. Darüber hinaus werden Fragestellungen zum Charakter des Mentalen und zu verschiedenen Typen mentaler Zustände in den Blick genommen, etwa die Debatten über Qualia, Intentionalität, Gedächtnis und das Verhältnis zwischen Denken und Sprache. Abgerundet wird das Bild durch Beiträge zum Thema Willensfreiheit, zur empirischen Erforschung mentaler Zustände sowie zu historischen Positionen in der Leib-Seele-Debatte.

Reflective Equilibrium: Conception, Formalization, Application
Claus Beisbart, Gregor Betz, Georg Brun
Topical Collection, Synthese
Introduction

Reflective equilibrium ("RE", for short) is a method of justification which works roughly as follows: We start with our pre-theoretical judgements (about, e.g. moral issues) and try to explain them by a systematic theory. This leads to a process in which judgements and principles are mutually adjusted to each other until a state of equilibrium is reached. For more than half a century, RE has been very popular, as well as controversial, among philosophers of many persuasions. Given how frequently the method is mentioned, embraced and attacked, it is surprising that only very few attempts have been made at analysing and developing RE in detail. This topical collection brings together papers that develop RE on a conceptual level, analyse it using formal methods or investigate applications of RE.

 

Moralism as a Dualism in Ethics and Politics
Matthieu Queloz
Political Philosophy 2024

What is it that one fundamentally rejects when one criticizes a way of thinking as moralistic? Taking my cue from the principal leveller of this charge in philosophy, I argue that the root problem of moralism is the dualism that underlies it. I begin by distinguishing the rejection of moralism from the rejection of the moral/nonmoral distinction: far from being something one should jettison along with moralism, that distinction is something that any human society is bound to develop. But this valuable distinction is transformed into a problematic dualism when it casts the two sides of the distinction as contrasting sharply in nature, value, and structure. In ethics, the resulting dichotomy takes the form of a dualism of morality and prudence. In politics, it takes the form of a dualism of principle and interest. I explain the enduring appeal of such dualisms before laying out the costs of moralism thus conceived: moralism erodes our sensibility to the moral and political costs of value conflicts; it projects an unrealistic conception of agency that sets up scepticism about responsibility; and it limits our ability to appreciate and realize the wider variety of nonmoral values that sustain us, our achievements, and morality itself.