@phdthesis{Batti2023, author = {Batti, Anil Dominic}, title = {Schopenhauer's doctrine of salvation in relation to his critique of religion and philosophical teachings}, publisher = {Logos}, address = {Berlin}, isbn = {978-3-83255-735-5}, school = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam}, pages = {319}, year = {2023}, abstract = {Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was perhaps the last polymath among the great Germanic philosophers. Switching with ease and elegance between epistemic positions and fields as diverse as idealism and empiricism, fideism and rationalism, realism and nominalism, art and religion, jurisprudence and politics, psychology and occultism, Schopenhauer erected an imposing edifice bearing testimony to his universal learning. This study is an investigation into the very conclusion of Schopenhauer's philosophy and endeavours to answer the following question: did Schopenhauer's doctrine of salvation issue forth organically from his intellectual output or was it annexed to his philosophy as a result of his critical engagement with religion? The labyrinthine paths through which Schopenhauer arrives at the soteriological culmination of his philosophy are subjected to critical assessment; the picture that emerges is of a philosopher who seemed convinced that he had solved some of the most pressing cosmic riddles to have tormented mankind through the ages.}, language = {en} } @phdthesis{Mulamustafic2022, author = {Mulamustafic, Adem}, title = {The Clash of the Images}, series = {Theoria ; 3}, journal = {Theoria ; 3}, publisher = {Schwabe Verlag}, address = {Berlin}, isbn = {978-3-7574-0065-1}, doi = {10.25932/publishup-55816}, school = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam}, pages = {212}, year = {2022}, abstract = {In everyday life, we take there to be ordinary objects such as persons, tables, and stones bearing certain properties such as color and shape and standing in various causal relationships to each other. Basic convictions such as these form our everyday picture of the world: the manifest image. The scientific image, on the other hand, is a system of beliefs that is only based on scientific results. It contains many beliefs that are not contained in the manifest image. At first glance, this may not seem to be a problem. But Mulamustafi? shows convincingly that this is a mistake: The world as it is in itself cannot be both the way the manifest image depicts it and the way the scientific image describes it to be. Adem Mulamustafic studied and completed his PhD in philosophy at the University of Potsdam. His areas of specialization are metaphysics, philosophy of science, and critical thinking.}, language = {en} } @phdthesis{Sperotto2022, author = {Sperotto, Tommaso U. A.}, title = {Axel Honneth and the Movement of Recognition}, series = {Deutsche Zeitschrift f{\"u}r Philosophie / Sonderb{\"a}nde ; 46}, journal = {Deutsche Zeitschrift f{\"u}r Philosophie / Sonderb{\"a}nde ; 46}, publisher = {de Gruyter}, address = {Berlin}, isbn = {978-3-11-077207-4}, school = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam}, pages = {IX, 331}, year = {2022}, language = {en} } @phdthesis{Seiberth2021, author = {Seiberth, Luz Christopher}, title = {Intentionality in Sellars}, series = {Routledge studies in American philosophy}, journal = {Routledge studies in American philosophy}, publisher = {Routledge}, address = {New York, NY}, isbn = {978-1-032-11493-4}, doi = {10.4324/9781003221364}, school = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam}, pages = {xxii, 230}, year = {2021}, abstract = {This book argues that Sellars' theory of intentionality can be understood as an advancement of a transcendental philosophical approach. It shows how Sellars develops his theory of intentionality through his engagement with the theoretical philosophy of Immanuel Kant. The book delivers a provocative reinterpretation of one of the most problematic and controversial concepts of Sellars' philosophy: the picturing-relation. Sellars' theory of intentionality addresses the question of how to reconcile two aspects that seem opposed: the non-relational theory of intellectual and linguistic content and a causal-transcendental theory of representation inspired by the philosophy of the early Wittgenstein. The author explains how both parts cohere in a transcendental account of finite knowledge. He claims that this can only be achieved by reading Sellars as committed to a transcendental methodology inspired by Kant. In a final step, he brings his interpretation to bear on the contemporary metaphilosophical debate on pragmatism and expressivism. Intentionality in Sellars will be of interest to scholars of Sellars and Kant, as well as researchers working in philosophy of mind, epistemology, and the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy.}, language = {en} } @phdthesis{Menting2020, author = {Menting, Thijs}, title = {Purposiveness of nature in Kant's third critique}, publisher = {Universit{\"a}tsverlag Potsdam}, address = {Potsdam}, isbn = {978-3-86956-484-5}, doi = {10.25932/publishup-44433}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-444336}, school = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam}, pages = {xii, 304}, year = {2020}, abstract = {This dissertation aims to deliver a transcendental interpretation of Immanuel Kant's Kritik der Urteilskraft, considering both its coherence with other critical works as well as the internal coherence of the work itself. This interpretation is called transcendental insofar as special emphasis is placed on the newly introduced cognitive power, namely the reflective power of judgement, guided by the a priori principle of purposiveness. In this way the seeming manifold of themes, varying from judgements of taste through culture to teleological judgements about natural purposes, are discussed exclusively in regard of their dependence on this faculty and its transcendental principle. In contrast, in contemporary scholarship the book is often treated as a fragmented work, consisting of different independent parts, while my focus lies on the continuity comprised primarily of the activity of the power of judgement. Going back to certain central yet silently presupposed concepts, adopted from previous critical works, the main contribution of this study is to integrate the KU within the overarching critical project. More specifically, I have argue how the need for the presupposition by the reflective power of judgement follows from the peculiar character of our sense-dependent discursive mind. Because we are sense-dependent discursive minds, we do not and cannot have immediate insight into all of nature's features. The particular constitution of our mind rather demands conceptually informed representations which mediately refer to objects. Having said that, the principle of purposiveness, namely the presupposition that nature is organized in concert with the particular constitution of our mind, is a necessary condition for the possibility of reflection on nature's empirical features. Reflection refers on my account to a process of selecting features in order to allow a classification, including reflection on the method, means and selection criteria. Rather than directly contributing to cognition, like the categories, reflective judgements thus express our ignorance when it comes to the motivation behind nature's design, and this is most forcefully expressed by judgements of taste and teleological judgements about organized matter. In this way, reflection, regardless whether it is manifested in concept acquisition, scientific systematization, judgements of taste or judgements about organized matter, relies on a principle of the power of judgement which is revealed and justified in this transcendental inquiry.}, language = {en} } @phdthesis{Schoellner2016, author = {Schoellner, Karsten}, title = {Towards a Wittgensteinian metaethics}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-409288}, school = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam}, pages = {309}, year = {2016}, abstract = {This doctoral thesis seeks to elaborate how Wittgenstein's very sparse writings on ethics and ethical thought, together with his later work on the more general problem of normativity and his approach to philosophical problems as a whole, can be applied to contemporary meta-ethical debates about the nature of moral thought and language and the sources of moral obligation. I begin with a discussion of Wittgenstein's early "Lecture on Ethics", distinguishing the thesis of a strict fact/value dichotomy that Wittgenstein defends there from the related thesis that all ethical discourse is essentially and intentionally nonsensical, an attempt to go beyond the limits of sense. The first chapter discusses and defends Wittgenstein's argument that moral valuation always goes beyond any ascertaining of fact; the second chapter seeks to draw out the valuable insights from Wittgenstein's (early) insistence that value discourse is nonsensical while also arguing that this thesis is ultimately untenable and also incompatible with later Wittgensteinian understanding of language. On the basis of this discussion I then take up the writings of the American philosopher Cora Diamond, who has worked out an ethical approach in a very closely Wittgensteinian spirit, and show how this approach shares many of the valuable insights of the moral expressivism and constructivism of contemporary authors such as Blackburn and Korsgaard while suggesting a way to avoid some of the problems and limitations of their approaches. Subsequently I turn to a criticism of the attempts by Lovibond and McDowell to enlist Wittgenstein in the support for a non-naturalist moral realism. A concluding chapter treats the ways that a broadly Wittgensteinian conception expands the subject of metaethics itself by questioning the primacy of discursive argument in moral thought and of moral propositions as the basic units of moral belief.}, language = {en} } @phdthesis{ElKassar2015, author = {El Kassar, Nadja}, title = {Towards a theory of epistemically significant perception}, publisher = {De Gruyter}, address = {Berlin}, isbn = {978-3-11-044563-3}, school = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam}, pages = {360}, year = {2015}, abstract = {How does perceptual experience make us knowledgeable? This book argues that the answer lies in the nature of perceptual experience: this experience involves conceptual capacities and is a relation between perceiver and world. The author develops her position via a critical examination of conceptualist and relationist theories of perception. A discussion of recent work in vision science rounds up this contribution to the philosophy of perception.}, language = {en} } @phdthesis{Giesewetter2011, author = {Giesewetter, Stefan}, title = {Resolute readings of later Wittgenstein and the challenge of avoiding hierarchies in philosophy}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-57021}, school = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam}, year = {2011}, abstract = {This dissertation addresses the question: How did later Wittgenstein aim to achieve his goal of putting forward a way of dissolving philosophical problems which centered on asking ourselves what we mean by our words - yet which did not entail any claims about the essence of language and meaning? This question is discussed with reference to "resolute" readings of Wittgenstein. I discuss the readings of James Conant, Oskari Kuusela, and Martin Gustafsson. I follow Oskari Kuusela's claim that in order to fully appreciate how later Wittgenstein meant to achieve his goal, we need to clearly see how he aimed to do away with hierarchies in philosophy: Not only is the dissolution of philosophical problems via the method of clarifying the grammar of expressions to be taken as independent from any theses about what meaning must be - but furthermore, it is to be taken as independent from the dissolution of any particular problem via this method. As Kuusela stresses, this also holds for the problems involving rule-following and meaning: the clarification of the grammar of "rule" and "meaning" has no foundational status - it is nothing on which the method of clarifying the grammar of expressions as such were meant to in any way rely on. The lead question of this dissertation then is: What does it mean to come to see that the method of dissolving philosophical problems by asking "How is this word actually used?" does not in any way rely on the results of our having investigated the grammar of the particular concepts "rule" and "meaning"? What is the relation of such results - results such as "To follow a rule, [...], to obey an order, [...] are customs (uses, institutions)" or "The meaning of a word is its use in the language" - to this method? From this vantage point, I concern myself with two aspects of the readings of Gustafsson and Kuusela. In Gustafsson, I concern myself with his idea that the dissolution of philosophical problems in general "relies on" the very agreement which - during the dissolution of the rule-following problem - comes out as a presupposition for our talk of "meaning" in terms of rules. In Kuusela, I concern myself with his idea that Wittgenstein, in adopting a way of philosophical clarification which investigates the actual use of expressions, is following the model of "meaning as use" - which model he had previously introduced in order to perspicuously present an aspect of the actual use of the word "meaning". This dissertation aims to show how these two aspects of Gustafsson's and Kuusela's readings still fail to live up to the vision of Wittgenstein as a philosopher who aimed to do away with any hierarchies in philosophy. I base this conclusion on a detailed analysis of which of the occasions where Wittgenstein invokes the notions of "use" and "application" (as also "agreement") have to do with the dissolution of a specific problem only, and which have to do with the dissolution of philosophical problems in general. I discuss Wittgenstein's remarks on rule-following, showing how in the dissolution of the rule-following paradox, notions such as "use", "application", and "practice" figure on two distinct logical levels. I then discuss an example of what happens when this distinction is not duly heeded: Gordon Baker and Peter Hacker's idea that the rule-following remarks have a special significance for his project of dissolving philosophical problems as such. I furnish an argument to the effect that their idea that the clarification of the rules of grammar of the particular expression "following a rule" could answer a question about rules of grammar in general rests on a conflation of the two logical levels on which "use" occurs in the rule-following remarks, and that it leads into a regress. I then show that Gustafsson's view - despite its decisive advance over Baker and Hacker - contains a version of that same idea, and that it likewise leads into a regress. Finally, I show that Kuusela's idea of a special significance of the model "meaning as use" for the whole of the method of stating rules for the use of words is open to a regress argument of a similar kind as that he himself advances against Baker and Hacker. I conclude that in order to avoid such a regress, we need to reject the idea that the grammatical remark "The meaning of a word is its use in the language" - because of the occurrence of "use" in it - stood in any special relation to the method of dissolving philosophical problems by describing the use of words. Rather, we need to take this method as independent from this outcome of the investigation of the use of the particular word "meaning".}, language = {en} } @phdthesis{Doyle2007, author = {Doyle, Timothy F.}, title = {The role of context in meaning and understanding}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-20691}, school = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam}, year = {2007}, abstract = {In this work the concept of 'context' is considered in five main points. First, context is seen as always necessary for an adequate explication of the concepts of meaning and understanding. Context always plays a role and is not merely brought into consideration when handling a special class of statements or terms, or when there is doubt and clarification is necessary. Second, context cannot be completely reduced to some system of representation. The reason for this is the presence of humans, which is always an important component of a context. Humans experience situations in ways that are not always reducible to symbolic representation. Third, contexts are in principle open. In normal cases they cannot be determined or described in advance. A context is not to be equated with a set of information. Fourth, we understand the parameters of a context pragmatically, which is why we are not led into doubt or even to meaning skepticism by the open nature of a context. This pragmatic knowledge belongs to the category of an ability. Fifth, contexts are, in principle, accessible. This denies the idea that some contexts are incommensurable. There are a number of pragmatic ways of accessing unfamiliar contexts. Some of these are here examined in light of the so-called 'culture wars' in the U.S.A.}, language = {en} }