Grazer Philosophische Studien

Wittgenstein's critique of solipsism is explained as a development in three stages. In the first, which appeares in the Notebooks 1914-16 and Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, he criticizes the solipsist for not identifying his ego and, therefore, leaving the objects presented to it unidentified. He argues that this is like trying to identify the eye without using any psychological facts. In the second stage, which appeares in The Blue Book and Notes for Lectures on "Private Experience" and "Sensations", he assumes that the solipsist does not even try to identify his ego but merely points at the objects of which he is directly aware. The critique of this inward pointing is based on a development of the original analogy between ego and eye. The third stage is the argument against the possibility of a sensation-language without any connections with the physical world. This appeares in Notes for Lectures on "Private Experience" and "Sense Data" and in Philosophical Investigations. Here the focus is not on the ego but on the objects presented to it. However the criticism is similar: those objects and their types need criteria of identity but would not have sense i f they were not connected with the physical world.

In his efforts to demonstrate graphically that alternative modes of presentation of the principles of mechanics could eliminate the difficulties surrounding such problematic notions as "force" in mechanics that tormented scientists and philosophers alike, Heinrich Hertz delivered Ludwig Wittgenstein with a highly original hermeneutic technique, which would influence all of the latter's thinking, and in fact become the cornerstone of his mature philosophical method. All of the features of Wittgenstein's conception of philosophy in fact emerge from his early scientific background only to be complimented and embellished, but in no sense fundamentally altered by his later encounters with the likes of Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore or Frank Ramsey. The Hertzian origin of Wittgenstein's philosophizing clearly indicates 1) why Wittgenstein was never tempted by positivism and at the same time 2) why he remained a "scientific" philosopher his whole life long and 3) reduce the charges of irrationalism that have been raised against him to absurdity.

According to the standard interpretation, Aristotle has two accounts of induction (epagoge): intuitive induction (which is not an inference) and complete induction (which is not a kind of non-demonstrative inference). Hintikka has challenged the usual interpretation of Aristotle's "official account" in Analytica Priora II, 23. In this paper, Hintikka's view is compared with a similar, but in some respects perhaps even more plausible, interpretation that William Whewell gave already in 1850. Both Hintikka and Whewell argue convincingly that Aristotelean induction is connected to concept formation. According to Whewell, the key to Aristotle's account is not the exhaustiveness or completeness of the sample of special cases, but rather its representativeness for the purpose of generalization.

Mathematical Astronomy as the most developed branch of ancient exact sciences has been widely discussed - especially epistemological issues e.g. concerning astronomy as a prime example of the distinction between instrumentalist and realist understanding of theories. In contrast to these the very methodology of ancient astronomy has received little attention. Following the work of Jaakko Hintikka and Unto Remes Aristarchus' method of determining the distance of the Sun is sketched and Ptolemy's solar model is discussed in detail.

What primitive concepts does formal ontology require? Forsaking as too indirect the linguistic way of discerning the categories of being, this paper considers what primitives might be required for representing things in themselves (noumena) and representations of them in a thoroughly crafted large autonomous multi-purpose database. Leaving logical concepts and material ontology aside, the resulting 32 categories in 13 families range from the obvious (identity/difference, existence/non-existence) through the fairly obvious (part/whole, one/many, sequential order) and the surprisingly familiar (illocutionary modes, mass/count, indexical/descriptive) to the controversial (moment/fundament, transparent/opaque) and the arcane (modes of class delimitation, taxonomic rank, aspects of designators). Any such list is speculative and tentative, but the test of this one will be in its implementation, a new departure for philosophical category theories.

According to relativized transcendentalism, the meaning of expressions, consisting in their intension and extension, is provided by a set of (syntactical, semantical and pragmatical) rules which prescribe their correct use in a context. We interpret a linguistic system by fixing a domain (of the values of the variables) and by assigning exactly one object to each individual constant and n-tuples of objects to predicates. The theory says that proper names have a purely referential role and that their meaning is therefore limited to the individual they designate. Since all singular terms must refer to exactly one referent there are no so-called empty names. A proper name is defined as a syntactically unstructured term in a language L used in a context C such that the truth condition for a sentence (Φα in L and C consists in the fact that, in accord with the rule which maps items from the set of individual constants into the set of objects, a refers to an object x and x satisfies Φ. It is shown how - by using this theory - puzzling problems concerning Frege's morning star and evening star, allegedly empty names, changes of name etc. can easily be solved.

Jaakko Hintikka's Kantianism in philosophy of logic and mathematics is known to go further than Kant's own, for he argues that mathematical reasoning involves the "language-games" of seeking and finding. Therefore, logic mirrors the structure of this activity. But Hintikka also pushes the Copemican Revolution further to epistemology and philosophy of science. He agrees that "reason has insight only into what which it produces after a plan of ist own", but gives the idea a new logical turn. Kant thought that reason imposes certain architectonic constraints on the possible outcome of inquiry, but Hintikka's interrogative model of inquiry also emphasizes the activity of and therefore the strategy in, putting questions to Nature.

Jaakko Hintikka's concept of belief (aBp) as presented in his Knowledge and Belief is such that in his epistemic logic aKp —> aBp is a thesis. This concept (B-belief) is one important kind of belief and can be contrasted with a different concept of belief (G-belief, denoted by 'aOp') not discussed in Hintikka's book. It is to some extent opposite to the one above in the sense that it is knowledge-exclusive, whereas Hintikka's is knowledge-inclusive. This is shown by the thesis aKp —> —laGp or aGp —> —laKp. My thesis is that this kind of belief is used as the belief in scientific hypothesis and as religious belief. Both G-belief and B-belief are applied to examples from physics and religion and consistency criteria are discussed for either concept.

A naturalistic theory of modal intuitions and modal reasoning inspired by Hintikka's theorizing should start from the principle that advanced modal reasoning has its roots in commonsense intuitions. It is proposed that the naturalist can rely on the assumption of uniformity: the same set of basic principles is used in reasoning about actual and counterfactual dependencies - modal cognition is conservative. In the most primitive cases the difference between a model of an actual situation and of a merely possible one lies in its functional and indicational roles, not in its internal make-up. This conjecture enables one to derive important aspects of modal reasoning from the non-modal one. In the final section of the paper a simplified account of such derivation is proposed, drawn partly from connection- ist literature.

It is the aim of this paper to find a systematic approach to the study of induction by integrating the ideas of several disciplines to have a successful instrument for analyzing processes of inference, learning and discovery. On the way to generalities which enable sensible forecasts the social and economic sciences use empirical work and nowadays we are encouraged to use more and more experimental access to investigate analogous situations. Induction is used as a fundamental concept and experimental work has brought some lights behind learning and inference.

This paper is both a slice of history, a warning and a congratulation. The history is about how the Russell papers found their way to a steel-town in Canada and how it came about that they have gradually been published. The warning is that it is extremely difficult to conduct such an enterprise on a co-operative basis, which may help to explain why so many enterprises of this kind have issued in failure. The congratulations are for those who have edited volumes of very different kinds, as a result of Russell's versatility, in a manner which throws new light on his intellectual history. All of this had to be described in a very schematic way. But it will, I hope, lead readers to the volumes themselves. Only there will they find the answer to the exercise I set towards the end of the article.

In the ideal case archives are the official places or institutions where all the biographical, bibliographical, published and unpublished material of one or several authors are collected and presented as well as their correspondencies, material belonging to them or their families, secondary literature etc. As there is hardly any ideal archive to be found some archives - more or less related to Austrian Philosophy - and their work are sketched and a rough scheme for the order of the literary estate of some author is suggested. By the example of the Meinong-Gesamtausgabe a fruitful combination of archival and editorial work is presented and finally some problems concerning present philosophical editions (Franz Brentano and Ludwig Wittgenstein) are discussed.