Form and Reflection

• Applicant: Dr. Fabian Börchers
• Subject Area: Theoretical Philosophy ; History of Philosophy
• Term: from 2019 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 430901065

• Final Report Year: 2024

Final Report Abstract

The project has been concerned with the question whether one can determine once and for all what it means to think in a logical, truth-oriented way. Following the Aristotelian tradition, one can also put this question as the query what form thought must exhibit in order to count as thought at all – independently from the contingent contents which one may think about at any given moment. In this context, the project has confronted itself with a sceptical challenge. According to this challenge, it is in principle impossible to determine the form of thought because any such attempt would have to be executed by us according to our own way of thinking. And this leads to the suspicion that the results of such a reflection must be limited in scope: all that we can ever claim to have determined is what we take to be correct thought. According to the sceptic, this, however, does not exclude the possibility that there is a different way of thinking that we cannot understand or take to be correct but which is, in its claim to correctness, strictly analogous to our own. The project has taken on this challenge through the engagement with the contemporary debate about both Gottlob Freges attempt to brush off any such sceptical doubts and Wittgenstein’s intricate critique of Frege’s attempt. In its course it has produced three results: First, it has shown that the three opposed philosophical positions of logical relativism, dogmatism and a sideway-on perspective on our own thought that frequently appear in the discussion fundamentally stem from a common misconception of the nature of the sceptical challenge. Second, it has shown that this misconception can only be avoided through a correct understanding of the idea that logical laws are constitutive rules of thought. Third, a reflective determination of thought should neither be conceived as a denial of the possibility of logically alien thought nor as the acceptance of such a possibility. Rather, the sense of such a possibility undetermined unless it is filled in concrete interaction with a candidate for such a thought. Any reflection on the limits of our thought, that is to say, cannot meaningfully take place in the abstract but can only be carried out in concrete hermeneutical interaction.

Publications

• Anscombe und Knowledge-How. Zum Zusammenhang von Form und Vermögen bei der Bestimmung absichtlichen Handelns. Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Philosophie (AZP), 45(3), 317-338.
  BÖRCHERS, FABIAN
  
• „Undenkbare Gedankenexperimente“, praefaktisch, 1.12.2020.
  Börchers, F.
  
• Knowledge How als praktisches Wissen – Schluss und Vermögen. Praktisches Wissen, 11-42. Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG.
  Börchers, Fabian