Philosophisches Jahrbuch

The article aims to recognize Heidegger’s late phenomenology of language as a situational ontology. It is shown that this approach is motivated by a hitherto unnoticed problem of relevance that goes beyond the traditional frame problem. The...

In his essay “Transparency, Self-Consciousness, and Reflection”, and in his book Transparency and Reflection, Boyle develops a solution to the problem of transparency according to which answers to suitable questions about the mind merely make...

This article discusses the way Matthew Boyle conceives of "reflection", a notion situated at the very heart of his philosophical project. After surveying how Boyle defines the notion and its function through the conceptual articulation of certain...

In the Discours sur l’inégalité, Rousseau introduces the key concept of love of oneself (amour de soi-même). He conceives it as an original impulse in human beings, one that can historically be found even before the development of reason....

Among legal scholars, P. J. A. Feuerbach is considered one of the most important German jurists of the 19th century: not only has he established Germany’s modern doctrine of penal law and the Bavarian penal code of 1813, but he is also the founder...

In my article, I intend to show that human self-optimization has been a fundamental question of practical philosophy from the very beginning, and that it is worth taking note of supposedly “old” models also with a view to today’s discussion....

Recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) promise cognitive optimization in many areas of our lives, ranging from automated decision-making to superintelligence. In a predominant narrative, the black-box of machine learning systems is...

The capacity of human knowers to turn their cognitive powers upon themselves has long fascinated philosophers. My book Transparency and Reflection grew out of an attempt to comprehend a fundamental thought from Kant about the significance of...

The modern program of operationalizing the mind, from Descartes to Kant, in the form of the externalization of human mind functions in logic and calculations, and its continuation in the program of formalization from the middle of the 19th century...

This paper argues that the common argument, that a state’s monopoly of violence is a necessary condition for peace, is flawed. First, it rests on anthropological assumptions about violent tendencies in human nature that may be valid for our...

This paper aims to determine the ontology of virtual reality from a historical and systematic point of view. The term “virtual reality” is often used synonymously with “illusion”, “immersion”, “simulation” or “fiction”. Against...

In a subject-philosophical perspective, a musical work embodies the creativity of a subject that has become a construction. As a temporal movement itself, it first expands internally sound-temporally as well as sound-spatially: in the form of an...

This article considers aspects of Philippa Foot’s theory of naturalist realist metaethics. It addresses the question of whether human nature can function as a direct source of normativity or whether it is more of a metanormative framework that is...

Kant’s highest good consists of happiness and the worthiness of happiness, that is, morality. The question of the exact connection between these two parts is disputed. Some argue that Kant proposed different, sometimes contradictory, concepts of...

This is the third part of a „controversy“, in which I respond to comments from Vera Hoffmann-Kolss, Johannes Hübner, Boris Kment, Kathrin Koslicki, Annina Loets, and Ulrich Metschl concerning my earlier paper „Möglichkeit ohne mögliche...