Ansgar Beckermann (born 29 June 1945, in
Hamburg
Hamburg (, ; nds, label=Hamburg German, Low Saxon, Hamborg ), officially the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg (german: Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg; nds, label=Low Saxon, Friee un Hansestadt Hamborg),. is the List of cities in Germany by popul ...
) is a German
philosopher who deals primarily with
philosophy of mind
Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the ontology and nature of the mind and its relationship with the body. The mind–body problem is a paradigmatic issue in philosophy of mind, although a number of other issues are ad ...
and
epistemology
Epistemology (; ), or the theory of knowledge, is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemology is considered a major subfield of philosophy, along with other major subfields such as ethics, logic, and metaphysics.
Episte ...
. He is professor for
philosophy at the University of
Bielefeld
Bielefeld () is a city in the Ostwestfalen-Lippe Region in the north-east of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. With a population of 341,755, it is also the most populous city in the administrative region ('' Regierungsbezirk'') of Detmold and ...
and was the president of the "Gesellschaft für analytische Philosophie" (German society for analytical philosophy). Beckermann is known for his arguments for
physicalism
In philosophy, physicalism is the metaphysical thesis that "everything is physical", that there is "nothing over and above" the physical, or that everything supervenes on the physical. Physicalism is a form of ontological monism—a "one substa ...
and his discussion of the concept of
emergence
In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence occurs when an entity is observed to have properties its parts do not have on their own, properties or behaviors that emerge only when the parts interact in a wider whole.
Emergen ...
.
Published works
English
*''Emergence or Reduction?'' (with Hans Flohr and
Jaegwon Kim
Jaegwon Kim (September 12, 1934 – November 27, 2019) was a Korean-American philosopher. At the time of his death, Kim was an emeritus professor of philosophy at Brown University. He also taught at several other leading American universities ...
), Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1992.
*''Wittgenstein, Wittgensteinianism and the Contemporary Philosophy of Mind – Continuities and Changes.'' In: A. Coliva & E. Picardi (ed.): ''Wittgenstein today'', 2004
*''Self-Consciousness in Cognitive Systems.'' In: C. Kanzian. J. Quitterer and E. Runggaldier (ed.) ''Persons. An Interdisciplinary Approach'', 2003
*"The perennial problem of the reductive explainability of phenomenal consciousness - C.D. Broad on the explanatory gap." In:
Thomas Metzinger
Thomas Metzinger (born 12 March 1958) is a German philosopher and professor of theoretical philosophy at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz. , he is an Adjunct Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies, a co-founder of thGe ...
(ed.) ''Neural Correlates of Consciousness - Empirical and conceptual Questions'', Cambridge, MIT-Press, 2000
German
*''Klassiker der Philosophie heute'' (with Dominik Perler), Stuttgart: Reclam 2004.
*''Analytische Einführung in die Philosophie des Geistes''. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1999.
*''Einführung in die Logik''. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1997.
*''Descartes' metaphysischer Beweis für den Dualismus'', Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber, 1986.
*''Analytische Handlungstheorie''. Bd. 2, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977.
*''Gründe und Ursachen''. Kronberg: Scriptor Verlag, 1977.
External links
Beckermann's HomepageGesellschaft für Analytische Philosophie
{{DEFAULTSORT:Beckermann, Ansgar
German philosophers
Philosophers of mind
Living people
German male writers
1945 births
People educated at the Sankt-Ansgar-Schule