John Dorsch – författare

“Know thyself.” Once carved into the stone at Delphi and popularized by Socrates as the guiding maxim of philosophy, this command captures the enduring human struggle to examine and justify our own beliefs. This book asks how such a capacity for self-knowledge could have arisen—our ability to reflect on and regulate what we believe in light of epistemic norms like justification and truth. To answer that question, it weaves together insights from comparative and developmental psychology, cognitive and affective neuroscience, and socio-cultural theories of cognition, including the 4E approach, which holds that cognition is extended across tools and environments, embodied in the biological and affective processes of the body, embedded within socio-cultural contexts, and enacted through active engagement with the world. Thus, at the heart of this inquiry lies the concept of 4E metacognition: the idea that self-knowledge originates in bodily mechanisms that generate emotional and dynamic feedback signals, which drive information-seeking behavior and manifest in outwardly observable expressions, scaffolding epistemic regulation within social communities.Yet the story of self-knowledge is not only about origins; it also has a future. Toward its conclusion, this book turns to how self-knowledge might evolve in our digital age. Technologies such as large language models and decision-support systems are not merely tools but infrastructures for cognition—new extensions of epistemic agency that shape how we reason, justify, and believe. This book explores whether such technologies will erode or enhance our capacity for justificatory reasoning, and asks a provocative question: if the conditions that give rise to epistemic agency in humans can be identified and replicated, could an artificial agent—such as a socially embedded robot—one day possess something akin to self-knowledge?In tracing both the evolutionary roots and the technological horizons of self-knowledge, this book offers a new account of what it means to “know thyself” in a world where the boundaries of cognition are rapidly shifting.

“Know thyself.” Once carved into the stone at Delphi and popularized by Socrates as the guiding maxim of philosophy, this command captures the enduring human struggle to examine and justify our own beliefs. This book asks how such a capacity for self-knowledge could have arisen—our ability to reflect on and regulate what we believe in light of epistemic norms like justification and truth. To answer that question, it weaves together insights from comparative and developmental psychology, cognitive and affective neuroscience, and socio-cultural theories of cognition, including the 4E approach, which holds that cognition is extended across tools and environments, embodied in the biological and affective processes of the body, embedded within socio-cultural contexts, and enacted through active engagement with the world. Thus, at the heart of this inquiry lies the concept of 4E metacognition: the idea that self-knowledge originates in bodily mechanisms that generate emotional and dynamic feedback signals, which drive information-seeking behavior and manifest in outwardly observable expressions, scaffolding epistemic regulation within social communities.Yet the story of self-knowledge is not only about origins; it also has a future. Toward its conclusion, this book turns to how self-knowledge might evolve in our digital age. Technologies such as large language models and decision-support systems are not merely tools but infrastructures for cognition—new extensions of epistemic agency that shape how we reason, justify, and believe. This book explores whether such technologies will erode or enhance our capacity for justificatory reasoning, and asks a provocative question: if the conditions that give rise to epistemic agency in humans can be identified and replicated, could an artificial agent—such as a socially embedded robot—one day possess something akin to self-knowledge?In tracing both the evolutionary roots and the technological horizons of self-knowledge, this book offers a new account of what it means to “know thyself” in a world where the boundaries of cognition are rapidly shifting.

Seminar paper from the year 2014 in the subject Literature - Comparative Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Tubingen, course: Dubliners and Glaswegians, language: English, abstract: Despite often being described as the prototypical author of postmodern literature, in a letter to Dietmar Bohnke, Alasdair Gray has this to say about postmodernism, "e;Post modernism seems the creation of scholars acquiring a territory to lecture upon."e; - thus ridiculing his status as a postmodern writer. In this paper, I'll work closely with Gray's short story collection, Glaswegians, and will interpret whether it is modern, postmodern, or post-postmodern. To assist my determination, I will investigate the history of the postmodern, dividing it into its philosophical and cultural vocabularies. The result of my investigation and interpretation is that Glaswegians is a post-postmodern work because, despite the play with what could be called a postmodern elements, it provides the reader with answers to postmodern dilemmas and points to something outside the text .

Essay from the year 2014 in the subject Philosophy - Philosophy of the 20th century, grade: 1,5, University of Tubingen, course: Husserls Logische Untersuchungen, language: English, abstract: An essay built upon the work of Kate Hamburger aimed at developing Rilke's theory of epistemology in relation to cognitive phenomenology. Kate Hamburger has argued that Rainer Maria Rilke was a poet practicing phenomenology. This paper builds off her work, assuming Rilke to have conducted phenomenology by composing his lyric, and, with aid of the Neue Gedichte, seeks to address the tension between sensory and cognitive phenomenology. Cognitive Phenomenology is a new field of research that seeks to discover, if there be such a thing, the qualia of cognitive states. By a close reading of Husserl principle text, Logische Untersuchungen, this paper first established the structure of intentionality. We then apply Husserl's notion of intentionality to Rilke's lyric. The result of this research is that according to Husserl's analysis of intentionality, the existence of a pure cognitive phenomenology is left unanswered, but cognitive phenomenology does exist and is qualitatively different from sensory phenomenology. Lastly, we propose that the quale of a cognitive state is the same as the necessary conditions for that state, whose structure can, and should, be rigidly defined through linguistics. We conclude with the thought that this task would be the left to a new branch of linguistics called phenomenological linguistics. We argue our perspective with examples from Rilke's poetry.

Seminar paper from the year 2016 in the subject Philosophy - Philosophy of the 20th century, grade: 1,0, University of Tubingen, language: English, abstract: Dishabituation experiments that involve an increase in the duration of longer looking times of infants have been argued to entail core knowledge. Despite how one chooses to understand the results of these experiments and whether or not core knowledge is needed to describe and explain them, what is needed is a theory that explains why infants find a state of affairs more novel and why infants behave as they do. This theory would account for infants' expectations. In his forthcoming publication, Stephen Butterfill suggest a theory based on what he calls phenomenal expectations. Butterfill maintains that phenomenal expectations not only describe and explain infants' behavior in anticipatory looking experiments, but also they are able to overcome Davidson's challenge of providing a middle-ground between propositional thought and mindless behavior. I begin by introducing the discussion concerning dishabituation experiments, core knowledge and phenomenal expectation, then I investigate the significance of phenomenal expectations integrated into theories of perception and test whether phenomenal expectations overcome Davidson's challenge.

Seminar paper from the year 2012 in the subject Philosophy - Philosophy of the 20th century, grade: 1,3, University of Tubingen, course: Hegels Differenzschrift, language: English, abstract: In this paper, I propose that Hegel and Frege are more alike than currently thought. As Hegel and Frege are the founding fathers of the continental and analytic cultures of philosophy respectively, the salient argument of this paper is that the two cultures are, likewise, more alike than thought. I compare Hegel's first publication, often called Differenzschrift, to Frege's later works on the philosophy of language, Funktion und Begriff and Uber Sinn und Bedeutung. I argue that in explicating the cognitive difference expressed by the concept of identity, Hegel develops a theory of pragmatics and semantics that has several similarities to the Mediated Reference Theory proposed by Frege. In doing so, I present an analytic account of Hegel's Absolute Identity determined by the equality of the co-domains produced by two compound functions. These functions are composed of semantic, pragmatic and epistemic constraints that evaluate the ontic content of a proposition.

Seminar paper from the year 2014 in the subject Literature - Comparative Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Tubingen, language: English, abstract: In "e;The Task of the Translator"e;, Walter Benjamin sets forth what he believes to be the true goal of any work of translation. Instead of conforming to the reader, a translation should conform to the source and target language of the work, the purpose of which is to expose the relationship between the two languages, how each complements the other in its use. But is there more to Benjamin's Task than that?Walter Benjamin is commonly thought of as a Neukantianer because of his influence by the Marburger school, especially Cohen. Little is known, however, about his influence by Husserl's school of phenomenology. In this paper, we will determine Benjamin's influence by phenomenology by first developing a concise conception of intentionality based on a close reading of Husserl's principle work Logische Untersuchungen, as intentionality is the key term linking Benjamin to the phenomenological tradition. We will then provide a novel interpretation of Benjamin's essay "e;Die Aufgabe des Ubersetzers"e; by focusing on his use of the phenomenological term 'intention' and, with help of Benjamin's fragments on the philosophy of language where he also used the term intention in the phenomenological sens, provide a novel understanding of what Benjamin means by "e;das Gemeinte"e; and "e;die Art des Meinens"e; with respect to his theory of translation.