Aktuelle Forschungsprojekte des Lehrgebietes Philosophie I

Reading as a Social Practice

A long-term project by Martin Lenz and Irmtraud Hnilica (from March 2025 onwards)

Here is a small blurb. Please feel free to get in touch, if you’re interested in collaborating:

According to an ever-growing consensus, there is a reading crisis today. It ranges from illiteracy and a lack of text comprehension to a reduced willingness of pupils and students to engage with complex texts. This development has been recognised as an area of ​​action. The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), for instance, has initiated measures to promote reading with significant funding for empirical educational research. By contrast, our project Reading as a Social Practice is meant as a reflexive evaluation of the reading crisis.

For starters, it is questionable what exactly this crisis consists of. Many academic disciplines are working on this question and related issues, but the expertise remains largely fragmented. Setting out from the disciplinary perspectives of philosophy and literary studies, our project aims at bringing together the fragmented expertise across disciplines and examining what reading actually is. The reading crisis, as well as the observation that a countervailing reading hype can be observed at the same time (associated, for example, with the social media phenomenon #booktok), is placed in a historical and systematic context. Considering, for instance, forms of reading aloud and quietly, various biblical interpretations, the novella tradition (where reading is presented as a social phenomenon), the salon culture and book clubs, reading is mostly a social practice. A communal bond weaves readers and books into larger contexts. Our project explores this by looking at three main areas:

1. Reading Theories and Text Types. – The project builds on theories of hermeneutics and tries to advance these further. Reading, we submit, is essentially determined by interactions between readers, which can decentre different text types, on which it nevertheless remains dependent.

2. Reading Cultures and Canon Formation. – The history of reading is examined as a history of social practices. In doing so, mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion come into focus. The social practice of reading, through its associated potential for distinction, usually swings in both directions.

3. Reading Scenes and Interventions. – Using specific reading scenes, we will examine, for instance, autosociobiographical texts from authors with a background of social climbing to explore the conditions for success and failure of reading practices as well as possible interventions. What role, for instance, does the opportunity for identifying reading play in reading socialization?

• Understanding Logic Formulas: Die Paraphrase logischer Formeln oder ihrer Instanzen durch umgangssprachliche Sätze führt im Allgemeinen nicht zu einem Verständnis der Formeln bzw. ihrer Instanzen. Die klassische Semantik mathematischer wie auch philosophischer Logiklehrbücher vermittelt nur eine Methode, anhand von einzelnen Interpretationen oder Beispielen zu zeigen, ob diese eine Formel wahr oder falsch machen. Sie vermittelt aber keine allgemeine Methode, wahre von falschen Interpretationen zu unterscheiden. Diesem Desiderat soll Abhilfe geschaffen werden, indem ein allgemeines Verfahren zur Generierung disjunktiver Normalformen in der Prädikatenlogik 1. Stufe und ihrer graphischen Darstellung entwickelt wird und erläutert wird, wie hierdurch ein allgemeines Kriterium der Unterscheidung wahrer und falscher Interpretationen angegeben werden kann. Dies soll für Fragen der Anwendung der Logik sowie der Logikdidaktik fruchtbar gemacht werden. Darüber hinaus soll durch die Fokussierung auf Formeln, die inhaltliche und kontextabhängige Aspekt ausblenden, auch ein Beitrag geleistet werden für die allgemeinere Frage nach kognitiven Prozessen beim Lesen, insoweit diese Prozesse formale Aspekte betreffen.
• The New Logic Project: New Logic is an algorithmic conception of first-order logic influenced by Wittgenstein's philosophy and his critique of Mathematical Logic. Its main idea is to decide logical properties (such as provability, consistency, satisfiability) by detection of patterns in normal forms or proof search sequences.According to this idea, the conception of logic is not only algorithmic but also iconic.
• Theory of Causation: A New Directionality Criterion for Regularity Theories of Causation (with Michael Baumgartner): It is one of the most frequent criticisms of regularity theories of causation that they cannot distinguish between causes and effects based on Boolean determination relations of sufficiency and necessity alone—jeopardizing their goal of reducing causationto Boolean determination. The criticism is based on the fact that determination relations can be symmetric but causation cannot. Regularity theorists have countered by pointing out that only simplistic determination structures are symmetric and by insisting that structures with a minimal complexity of two alternative causes per effect feature non-symmetric determination relations. We show that this regularity theoretic response is neither sufficient nor necessary to break symmetries of determination and, thus, to identify the direction of causation. To solve the problem, we introduce a new directionality criterion that, we argue, is both necessary and sufficient to distinguish between causes and effects based on relations of Boolean determination alone.

• Epistemic Friction with the World. Salvaging a Neo-Kantian Issue from McDowell’ – Empirisches Wissen steht in einem Spannungsverhältnis zur denkunabhängigen Welt. Einerseits ist es ein Konstrukt, das auf einem System von Grundbegriffen basiert – und andererseits macht es Behauptungen über die Welt und muss auch in Bezug auf diese korrigierbar sein. Der Artikel diskutiert dieses Problem mit und gegen Kant.
• Hegel’s Metaphysics of Freedom – Die Monographie verteidigt eine metaphysische Lesart von Hegels Logik und Sozialphilosophie gegen Hegel-Kritiker einerseits und eine pragmatische Lesart andererseits, und arbeitet dabei Hegels originelle und tiefsinnige Theorie struktureller Freiheit heraus.
• Thinking with and against the System. Concept Realism and Nominalism as critical tools in Adorno.’ (Artikel) Für Adorno ist der Kapitalismus ein begriffliches System. Dennoch reicht eine Begriffsanalyse (wie z.B. Marx sie im Kapital liefert) nicht aus, um den Kapitalismus zu verstehen oder zu kritisieren. Dafür bedarf es zusätzlich eines Akts des epistemischen Ungehorsams, ein Interesse für das scheinbar Unwichtige, das persönliche und somatische Leiden der Individuen im Kapitalismus.