Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung

Many of our beliefs are based on other mental states. What does this basing relation consist in? Causal theories give the following causal condition for the belief B being based on the mental state M: (CC) M has caused B (or causes that B is...

Is hope a virtue? The paper answers this question by meeting it in both directions: in which sense can hope be considered to be a virtue – more exactly: which answers are eligible depending on the presupposed understanding of virtue? And the other...

Are persons rational because they are self-conscious or are they self-conscious because they are rational? Wittgenstein's remarks on the grammatical peculiarities of first-person expressions are not only a criticism of the conception of a Cartesian...

The claims about free will that Descartes makes in his writings seem, at first glance, to be inconsistent. In recent years, several authors have argued that we can dissolve the apparent contradiction by taking a closer look at the role that...

This paper aims to historically problematize Bogen and Woodward's data-phenomena distinction. In the first section, we critically deal with it from a descriptive point of view. We argue that it merely has a narrow validity. It can indeed be employed...

Consent makes acts permissible that would otherwise be impermissible. But how is this done by consent? And can any act be made permissible, or are there acts that are morally wrong even if affected persons have given their consent? These two...

The main topic of this paper is ,,subjectivity" as the fundamental form of every subject. Subjectivity is hereby characterised as the capacity of the corporeal subject to orient himself spatiotemporally and to produce its relation to the world. The...

In his recent book Gott denken, Holm Tetens argues for a theist claim. Some of his arguments for this claim are based on his criticism of a particular account of science that Tetens attributes to atheists. This account of science consists in the...

Kant's chief preoccupation revolves around the question ,,what is the human being?", which, belonging in the tradition of Western philosophy, conceives of ,,morals" as being conducive to ,,religion". Subsequently this crucial issue fell victim to...

I discuss the relation between theoretical and practical activity in the Nicomachean Ethics. It seems that, according to EN X, it is rational for humans to contemplate as much as they can – even to the detriment of practical claims, such as to...

The idea of toleration leads somewhat of a double life in our liberal society. On the one hand, there is a fairly broad public consensus that toleration is a good thing. On the other hand, political philosophers have been puzzled by the conceptual...