Sebastian Roedl

• Leipzig University

This essay explores the idea of acting from knowledge. This idea is a thought of ourselves: the distinctive way in which we act, in which we live, resides in this, that our actions, our life, may rest on knowledge. Yet the idea of action resting on knowledge is puzzling, even mysterious. The difficulty springs from the character of judgment that is...

Life and “good” are interchangeable, I think. Life is good, goodness life. Michael Thompson has recovered the understanding of life as goodness for contemporary philosophy. However, he errs in thinking that our life, human life, is a certain kind of life. And so he errs in conceiving the idea of the good by which we live as that of a certain kind o...

The paper is an idealist attempt at reconciling the tension between the historical, time-bound emergence of metaphysical truths and their timeless validity. Proceeding from the Aristotelian definition of metaphysics as a science which studies being insofar as it is being, and from Plato’s notion from the Theaetetus that the soul does not grasp bein...

The term "second nature", which has already been used in antiquity, occupies a key position in the philosophical debates of the present. Even if it is interpreted differently in different traditional contexts, the term is always intended to solve the problem of how nature and freedom, causal necessity and human spirit relate to each other. The Cong...

I want to expound the fundamental thought of Fichte's Grundlage des Naturrechts: a freely acting individual is her relation to every other freely acting individual. Their relation is this: they know each other to be free. This knowledge is practical, that is, it is activity, and it is a relation, that is, they who are so related act one toward the...

In his most enlightening book Benson undertakes to give a public justification of contract law, which he distinguishes from a philosophical justification. This essay argues that this opposition is unsound. Benson’s justification is philosophical because it is internal: the justification contract provides for itself. As the justification is internal...

This essay explores what it means to reject Frege's distinction of force and content: the rejection completes Frege's anti‐psychologism as it leaves no space for a psychological concept of judgment distinct from the logical concept, which is the concern of no empirical science, but of logic. It emerges that logic, as the science of judgement, is —...

It has been recognized that ‘I think a is F’, considered as a predicative statement, is peculiar. The peculiarity comes out in Moore’s paradox, ‘a is F, but I do not think it is’. This statement appears afflicted by an inner tension. But if the logical form of ‘I think a is F’ is that of a predicative statement, then it is hard to discern a tension...

The essay represents teaching as the coming to be of the human individual. In order to do so, it reflects on the character of human life by which it is knowledge of itself. Being knowledge of itself, human life is self‐determining or free. Therefore generality and particularity come together in the human being in a distinctive way: a human being is...

In Barry Stroud’s book Engagement and Metaphysical Dissatisfaction , the eponymous dissatisfaction is said to be due to our inability to obtain certainty about the correspondence between the world and our ways of thinking it. In Stroud’s terms, this dissatisfaction is caused by the failure of the metaphysical enterprise. Beginning with Aristotle’s...

The first part of this essay develops the idea of logic as the science of thought, articulating, and thus being, the self-consciousness of thought. It explains that logic, so understood, is nothing other than metaphysics, the science of what is in so far as it is. Self-consciousness, then, thought itself, is not empty, but the source of all content...

Kant asserts that the formula of the schools “nihil appetimus, nisi sub ratione boni” is undoubtedly certain when clearly expressed (KpV 177). Conversely, doubt reflects a failure clearly to express it. Once we comprehend the concepts of the formula, of the good (bonum) and of desire (appetitus), there is no doubting it. In recent times, the formul...

In a series of essays, Bratman defines a concept, which we may call the concept of Bratmanian action by many. Our discussion of this concept, in section 1, reveals that it is not the one called to mind by the usual examples of joint action. Section 2 lays alongside it a different concept of doing something together. According to it, many are doing...

The second person is often set in contrast to the first person. And there is a contrast. It does not reside in a difference of what is thought as I from what is thought as you. For that is not different. The contrast is that of monadic and dyadic predication, action and transaction. It is the contrast, not of I and you, but of I and I–You. The seco...

Hat es eine ethische Bedeutung - eine Bedeutung dafür, wie zu handeln unbedingt gut ist - wenn das, bezogen worauf wir handeln, lebendig ist? Um darüber nachzudenken, müssen wir uns über den Begriff des guten Handelns und über den des Lebens verständigen. Der Begriff des Lebens bezeichnet die intern zweckmäßige Tätigkeit, die Tätigkeit, die keinen...

It is widely believed that we might be able produce life out of nonliving substances if we possessed the relevant knowledge. Thus synthetic biology is said to be on the way towards artificial life. But this is nonsense: “artificial life” cannot be thought. The idea that biological organisms could be produced reflects a misunderstandig of the concep...

The essay argues that there is no such thing as the epistemology of testimony as it is currently conceived: a subfield of epistemology that concerns itself with a special form of acquiring knowledge, a special kind of justification, a special sort of reason for belief. Rather, the concept of knowledge contains an account of the possibility of knowi...

Der Begriff der Freiheit zeigt keinen gesicherten Tatbestand an. Vielmehr bildet er den Titel einer Problemlage. Für sie fand Hegel drastische Worte: "Über keine Idee weiß man es so allgemein, daß sie unbestimmt, vieldeutig und der größten Mißverständnisse fähig und ihnen deswegen wirklich unterworfen ist als über die Idee der Freiheit, und keine i...

Der Gedanke, der sich in der modernen Idee der Autonomie verdichtet, ist ein doppelter: Die Figur der Autonomie enthält zugleich eine neue Auffassung von Normativität und eine eigene Konzeption von Freiheit. Dem Gedanken der Autonomie zufolge ist ein Gesetz, das wahrhaft normativ ist, eines, als dessen Urheber wir uns selbst betrachten können; und...

Martine Nida-Rümelin: Der Blick von innen. Zur transtemporalen Identität bewusstseinsfähiger Wesen. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt/M. 2007, 357 S.

She who is doing something intentionally represents doing it as good. The chapter argues that this describes the logical form of a practical representation. A practical representation is, formally, a conclusion of practical reasoning; it is practical in that it is a representation according to which its subject acts. The thesis, then, expresses the...

The essay develops a disjunctive account of perception, showing that it needs to be renamed 'self-conscious power account'. For it is by reference to a self-conscious power of sensory knowledge that, on the one hand, the unity of perception and illusion and, on the other hand, the priority of perception over illusion, specifically, its priority in...

Buchkritik zu: Stephen Darwall: The Second-Person Standpoint

Before and in the Groundwork, Kant argues as follows for the validity of the moral law: we want to be free. Following the moral law is the only way to be free. So we should follow the moral law.1 The first premise of this syllogism is treated differently before and in the Groundwork. First Kant thought it an empirical fact that men want to be free...

On the Fregean account of predication, which Brandom and Quine share, the predicative structure of a judgment consists in a certain deductive order of a suitable domain of judgments. A rival and, as will be argued, superior account of predication can be found in Kant, according to which the source of the predicative structure of thought is not an i...