 So I'm afraid that my speech will be a little bit anti-climactic. I come back to a topic that occupied me first some 40 years ago. And in the course of time I have come back occasionally to this topic. And I'm not even sure if I didn't even talk about these sorts of things. Also at some point here before. But there I have the same experience that Tony Daniels mentioned. That sometimes I don't even remember what I already said at what places and at what times. There are two strands of social thought. One can be described as trying to humanize the material world including animals and plants. To interpret the behavior of plants and animals in terms that we only apply normally to humans. To anthropomorphize the rest of the world. I think that approach is sometimes quite interesting to read. Nice books on this subject. But by and large I tend to think that that is all metaphors that we use that do not strictly apply to the material that they consider. I want to criticize here and show the failure of the opposite view. Which is usually endorsed by more tough-minded people. Who think that men can be explained entirely in natural science terms. That maybe we cannot do that now already but with a little bit more progress in the natural sciences. Eventually men will be reduced entirely to causal laws and causal explanations. Now I will not deny that we can give descriptions of men and his behavior in terms of naturalistic terms. All I want to show that is never all that is sufficient. It is certainly possible to describe and explain in naturalistic terms in the same way as we describe and explain stones and plants and animals. Namely in men described in the language of physics and chemistry and biology and genetics and neurology. There is nothing wrong with any of that. But a purely naturalistic account of humans, of men. While it is entirely legitimate and even if it is entirely true what physicists and chemists and neurologists say about men. An account of men only in those terms must fail to capture the uniqueness of men. The essence of men. What makes men different and distinguishes him from all other things. That is from stones and plants and animals. In fact any such purely naturalistic description of men would fail in the same way as a description of a painting. For instance in terms of physics, chemistry and so forth. We can describe a painting in purely physical terms. But what this description would leave out would be the essence of a painting as a painting. As something that was purposefully created and has some meaning. Now that is the case. We can easily recognize when we ask ourselves what it is that I am currently doing when I discuss this question. Namely the nature of men or any other question for that matter. And the answer is I now here speak to you in meaningful words and sentences. That I try to communicate with you with other persons. More specifically here what I do here is not merely wish you to understand what I am saying. In which endeavor of course I may fail or may succeed. That depends I might find out afterwards that I failed entirely. But at least that is my intention. But even more so I want to communicate with you and make a special form of communication. Namely I want to argue with you. I present arguments to you with a specific purpose. Namely to persuade you of the fact that what I am saying is right. Or at least not wrong. And again I can succeed in this task or I can fail in this task to persuade you of the truth of something merely by the use of words. We argue with the purpose of argumentative success. Of reaching agreement regarding the truth of some proposition or the validity of some argument. And in this endeavor I can again be successful or I can fail. Just as I can be successful or fail in simply making myself understood without the truth question entering the situation. Now it is obviously impossible however to give a naturalistic account of precisely this part or this aspect of human nature. Namely of meaningful words, of sentences, of arguments, of intentions, of purposes, of truth and falsehood and of success and of failure. Now to be sure we can give a naturalistic account of some aspects of the phenomenon of communication and argumentation. In the same way as we can also give a naturalistic account of a painting. There are vocal chords, there are sounds, there are scribbles on paper, there are brain activities, there are bodily movements and so forth involved. But there is nothing to be found in any such naturalistic account that would allow us to conclude that these movements, sounds, scribbles, nerves and so on have any meaning. And are used by a speaker or a writer as means for the purpose of communicating or arguing, whether successfully or not, with some other person. In nature there is nothing purposeful, there is nothing meaningful, there is nothing true or false, there is nothing successful or unsuccessful. We, we have purposes dealing with nature and we purposefully transform nature into artifacts as means for the attainment of further purposes. But nature itself has no purpose. Nature and the laws of nature are simply what they are and they work the way they do, unchangingly and unfailingly. Only of man-made artifacts can it be said to be right or wrong, successful or failing, given a human purpose. And only of man-made words, propositions and arguments produced for the purpose of interpersonal communication can it be said to be meaningful and understood or not, successful or not, true, false or indeterminate. In a most fundamental sense then, all means, things used to reach ends, all meanings and all truths are means, meanings and truths for men, for our purposes rather than means, meanings and truths an sich. Now accordingly, now every natural scientist, whether he's a biologist, a physiologist, a chemist, a geneticist or neurologist, anyone of these who claims that men can be reduced and causally explained to nothing else and by nothing else, but nature becomes entangled in an obvious contradiction and I want to just explain what that contradiction is. On the one hand, the men that this scientist speaks and writes about, that is men only seen as a piece of nature, which of course he claims this person who is committed to ontological naturalism, which he claims to be the only men there is. There is nothing else but men as a natural object that can be explained in terms of natural sciences. On the one hand, this person, he must admit this man has no purpose and no meaning and nothing about the inner workings of men is true or false, successful or failing. Everything in men, physically speaking, works the way it does in accordance with unchanging and unfailing causal laws. Even life and death have no meaning from the point of view of a natural scientist. Death and bodily decay, for instance, do not falsify any causal laws, nor does life confirm any causal laws. The same laws of nature hold for life and for death equally. Life and death are not a success or a failure from the point of view of nature. As far as men as nature is concerned, they are just normal events, death just as normal as life, health just as normal as illness. All of these events are simply morally or valuationally neutral or natural events. And yet, on the other hand, this natural scientist, who obviously counts himself as a member of the class of men, follows a purpose in conducting his research on men as nature. And he conducts purposeful operations and uses artifacts as means, various instruments and so forth. As means to reach some end that he wants to find out as a researcher. And he must obviously employ meaningful sentences to describe his own methods and to describe his own results of his research concerning, in and of itself, meaningless natural materials. Meaningless phenomena, meaningless processes. He claims that these methods are the correct methods rather than incorrect ones. And his results to be true or to be false or inconclusive. And for him, for the researcher, for the natural scientist who engages in researching about men. In contrast to men as nature, for him, death and bodily malfunctions do have a meaning and are indeed failures and malfunctions. Yet they have meaning and are failures or malfunctions only insofar as they are related to a human purpose. Namely, the purpose of wanting to preserve life, valuing life and health as something that is good and to prevent illness and death as something that is for him bad. Hence, we can conclude then that the naturalistic account was a naturalistic research program according to which men can and is to be exhaustively and completely described and explained in terms of natural sciences and natural causes could not even be formulated and expressed in words and sentences claiming to be meaningful and true without running into some inescapable contradiction. So I think all of these tough minds that people who say we can explain everything that humans do by whatever observing neurological processes, they make an elementary mistake. It has never, it is absolutely impossible from the observation of whatever things that go on in our brain what sentences will come out of it. Because the sentences that come out of it, he can only say after they have already been spoken, not at the moment when he just observes what goes on in our brain. This is just an absurdity and this problem can never be overcome regardless of what the progress of the natural sciences ever will be. So what we must do, we must recognize that there is an aspect of men that we might call the cultural aspect of men that is cannot be reduced to a naturalistic aspect. We must all our descriptions, all our explanations of human activities must contain causal elements, but they must be supplemented also by what we might call teleological elements. Now I want to say at least a few words about the cultural achievements of men. What cannot be reduced to natural science considerations? These things of course include material things such as cars and airplanes for instance. How can we give a naturalistic explanation for the existence of cars and airplanes? Those are things, they are material objects but nevertheless they were created for a certain purpose. A naturalistic account of this can describe what a car looks like or something like that. We can never describe that as a car. But I don't want to just concentrate on these material manifestations but I want to concentrate for a moment just on what we might call the foremost cultural achievement and aspect of mankind. That is language as a means to communicate with other persons and to coordinate our actions with the actions of other people or to use the title, the phrase from a famous book. I want to show how we get things done by words, how to do things by words. There is obviously no human culture without language and there certainly is no such thing as philosophy and philosophizing without making some use of language. And what I want to indicate now is that we only become persons, responsible persons in the sense that we refer to each other by and in learning a language. Ludwig Wittgenstein has described this very nicely. Language does not spring up naturally but is a man-made artifice designed for a specific purpose, namely the purpose of successful communication, successful coordination of our activities. We know of course that newborn babies can make noises but they cannot speak and that their first movements are bodily movements that can be causally explained but they are not purposeful actions for which an individual baby could be held in any way responsible. But simply behavior that can be fully and exhaustively described and explained in naturalistic terms. It takes time for babies to grow up and learn in playful exercises Wittgenstein calls that language games. With adults how to successfully act and speak so as to gradually then become an adult that is a person that shares common words and a common perception of all the stuff making up our everyday lives with other persons. And that is and is held to be personally accountable and responsible for his actions and words vis-a-vis other speakers, other persons. Through the presentation of examples and counter examples and by demonstration, by repetition and imitation the adult gradually teaches a child the common or communal use and meaning of words and actions. In these exercises the adult controls, tests and possibly corrects the child's understanding of specific words by its performance or non-performance of appropriate actions and of the specific actions by appropriate words. So words and actions correct each other by observing actions and what is spoken we gradually learn what it is to act in the right way and so forth and what the right use of words is and what the right way of acting is. And in so doing then the child gradually learns the common use and meaning of such words or concepts as yes and no and the right and wrong of success and of failure of truths and of false and also of course the meaning of lying which implies that you know what is right and deliberately don't say what is right. But obviously the baby cannot give an account of this transition which is to confirm again that any naturalistic explanation of the transition from behavior and noise to acting and meaningful speech is impossible. Rather this transition can only be reconstructed after the event, after we already know what it is to act and to make meaningful statements. Now interestingly Wittgenstein has also some interesting insights relating to the very purpose of language. I said that the purpose of language is obviously to successfully communicate with other people. Wittgenstein analyzes the question can there be such a thing as a private language, a private language would obviously be a language that is not designed for the purpose of communication. And there he says something like this when he tries to make the point that no all languages have to be public languages, languages that other people can also understand nothing only for ourselves. So Wittgenstein argued of course one can say for instance that my pain is private in the sense that only I and no one else can experience my pain. But this is simply a statement about the grammar or the semantic of the term pain, private and I. These terms pain, private and I are not private terms, they are public terms and that we speak about inner things that only we experience is speaking in a public language. Similarly Wittgenstein pointed out that one can of course say for instance the meaning of the sign E is some particular inner privately felt emotion. However this requires that one must already know the meaning of meaning and the meaning of sign. And yet this an understanding of the meaning of meaning and of sign again presupposes the existence of a public or communal language, something that we learn by becoming socialized. And the same result we reach that is about the impossibility of a private language and the recognition of the fact that all language is designed to make cooperation, coordination and things like that possible. So the same insight we reach by the following consideration, an infant that is abandoned by his parents and let's say miraculously survives and is reared by animals, whether wolves or monkeys will, should it re enter human society later on, will not come back with a language, he will come back speaking no language at all. Nor will he be able of course to speak the language of wolves and monkeys because they don't speak any languages. This is just a metaphor that we just ascribe to them, but there's no scientific basis for that whatsoever to say that they speak, that they speak a language or communicate in meaningful terms with with each other. Which again belies all talk about a language instinct or of the brain creating language, rather provided his cognitive development has not been stifled for too long by the absence of any human society to be still capable of doing so, he will have to slowly and painstakingly learn a language to turn from the human animal that he has become into a human person. And the language he will have to learn is not and has never been for anyone who ever learned speaking and language, some universal language generated by some underlying universal grammar as the natural or naturalistic instinct or brain theory of language would lead one to expect. But it will be and always has been a particular language, German, English, whatever it is, spoken by a particular community of native speakers, which again once again confirms the insight that I already reached before, namely that meaningful speech and language are the products of human culture and decidedly not of nature, even if one is readily to admit of course that there would be no distinct human cultures with distinct human languages without some common underlying universal human nature, namely some universal physiology, brain structure and so forth that are characteristic for the entire human species. So that should conclude my point and I hope not only that you have understood what I said, but I have also persuaded you of what I said, then my speech would have been successful. I will not ask you all of you if it was successful or not, but if it wasn't, then you can be pretty sure that there will be future occasions arising when I bother you with this type of topic again. Thank you very much.