Epistemology

First of all: Why is there no section on 'The Philosophy of Language'? Because - as Michael Dummett, Peter Strawson and others put it - analysis of language and meaning defines the approach Analytic Philosophy in the tradition of Frege and Carnap follows in dealing with epistemological and thus metaphysical issues.

Classes taught:

  • Induction

  • Empirism in the 20th Century

  • Epistemology

  • Time

  • Frege's Philosophy of Language

  • States and Events

  • Carnap, Meaning and Necessity

  • Priest: In Contradiction

  • Nozick: The Nature of Rationality

  • Husserl: Cartesian Meditations

  • Atheistic Arguments

  • Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

  • Philosophy of Science

  • Religious Experience and Language

  • Can Religious Belief/Disbelief Be Justified?

  • Hönigswald, Philosophie und Sprache

  • Hume, An Enquiry Concering Human Understanding

 

Teaching materials:

 

Published Work:

Philosophische Semantik.
Frankfurt a.M. (Ontos), 2005.

Table of Content

 

Some Reviews:

 

Some Talks:

 

General Research/Fields of Interest:

Philosophical Logic and Metalogic as Epistemology
So called "philosophical logics" (mainly modal logics) are a primary tool of conceptual analysis and model building. The work of conceptual clarification or  model building, nowadays ascribed to the philosopher, has to use these logics as tools. 
In a sense some of my work could be titled Transcendental Logic Revisited. Roughly speaking I take the idea of transcendental philosophy to be an approach that still has it merits, i.e. the approach that considers as the central question of philosophy to outline the necessary conditions of our (linguistic) access to ourselves, each other and the world. Transcendental philosophy thus understood cannot be completely a priori, as traditionally taken to be, but is in some parts continous to or co-operating with the cognitive sciences in outlining a wide reflective equlibrium with respect to our intuitive notions, philosophical/logical reconstructions and cognitive models of our cognitive faculties (of reasoning or language use). Further on, in contrast to Kant's original distinction between formal and transcendental logic, formal logic (especially meta-logic) itself yields epistemological and metaphysical insights into our conceptual scheme. Topics I am especially interested in are: the case for higher order logic; the metaphysics of sets, classes and heaps; the Church-Turing-Thesis; the methodology of so called 'transcendental arguments' or re-construction of implicit knowledge and the metaphysics that follows from the semantics of natural languages. An outline of the approach - a partial philosophical credo, so to say - can be found in the paper Transcendental Logic Redefined. All this again is linked to my work in paraconsistency.

Philosophical Semantics
Starting with my dissertation my idea of philosophical semantics was to combine two major approaches. On the one hand some version of a justificationist semantics seems to me to be on the right track (even if verificationism in the early sense of the Vienna Circle was a failure). The meaning of a statement provides or is closely connected to methods to justify that the statement is true. On the other hand the thesis of holism has to be taken seriously, even if one sticks to an analytic/synthetic-distinction, as I do. In fact only sticking to some analytic/synthetic-distinction prepares (semantic) holism to meet its critics. So the resulting theory of meaning claims that on some level of description the meaning of statements can be given by other statements which provide the criteria of use (or justification) of the sentence employed in the statement under discussion. The book Philosophische Semantik tries to argue for this in detail. The theory incorporates some central ideas of a rule-following and a truth-conditional semantics. Semantics in this sense comes with an analytic/synthetic distinction [see the paper on that]; I argue that it can be defended and is compatible with formal and cognitive approaches to semantics. Even if a major alternative, like Fodor's conceptual atomism, is closer to the truth about meaning, procedures of justification and some analytic dependencies between lexical items are at some level of desription a proper and independent object of an epistemically invested study of language; that is one of the main ideas of the more recent book Conceptual Atomism and Justificationist Semantics. I came to like conceptual atomism and the corresponding externalist theory of content. Nonetheless there is a place for analytic/conceptual links and procedures of justification somewhere in natural language semantics, or at least nearby. 

 

©  Manuel Bremer