Time: April 26, 18:00 EEST = 19:00 CEST.

Speaker: Prof. Dr. Christoph Lumer, Professor of Moral Philosophy, University of Siena (Italy)http://www.lumer.info, https://docenti.unisi.it/en/lumer

Title of the talk: "Methods in Philosophy – From Applied Philosophy to the Fundamentals".

Abstract: This contribution seeks to give an overview from a normative perspective of methods currently used in philosophy. 'Normative perspective' here means that good methods are presented and justified in detail, while bad ones are criticised briefly - briefly, because the contribution is mainly intended to be constructive. 1. Applied philosophies (e.g. applied ethics) should, according to the idea, actually only apply principles developed on a more fundamental level, i.e. logically derive a decision on certain cases from these principles and empirical situation descriptions. This is explained using the example of welfare-ethical evaluations, especially the ethics of war. Applied philosophies, however, often go beyond this empirical deductive practice. 2. The dispute over methods in philosophy concerns above all the more fundamental parts of philosophy, e.g. the methods to be applied in normative ethics. Here, for example, the following methods are in conflict: methodological naturalism; various types of intuitionism from reflective equilibrium to certain varieties of experimental philosophy; conceptual analysis including conceptual engineering. A brief critique of such methods with an eye to the goals of philosophy is then followed by the innovative main part of the contribution: the presentation of four ideal types of theory in philosophy together with their methods, which are also implemented in real terms (although seldom purely), but are not theorised in the methodological discussion to date: descriptive-nomological, idealising-hermeneutic, technical-constructive and ontic-practical theories.