Julian Nida-Rümelin

Naturalism is the dominant metaphysical attitude in the natural sciences as well as in a good part of the social sciences and even in the humanities (sometimes seen in a combination of post-modernism and naturalism). Nida-Rümelin shows that this implicit or explicit naturalism cannot be maintained. The impetus behind most of his arguments against naturalism is pragmatist: he takes the constituency of human agency as given and tries to show that these constituents are incompatible with naturalism. There is no plausible naturalistic interpretation of reason, freedom, and responsibility. Nida-Rümelin first presented his arguments in a trilogy of books: the first about practical reason (2001), the second about freedom (2005), and the third about responsibility (2011). Practical reason, epistemic and practical freedom, epistemic, practical and emotive responsibility are interpreted as three aspects of the same phenomenon: being affected by reasons. This does not mean that the chain of reasoning does not come to an end. On the contrary, here again Nida-Rümelin is close to Wittgenstein in claiming that all reasoning ends in the indisputable elements of our shared form of life. It is irrational to doubt everything, or as Wittgenstein claims, there are some things that a sensible human man will not doubt. Moreover, reasoning is relevant for actions. To doubt it would mean that human beings can transcend their human condition. As Peter Strawson argued in an influential article 'Freedom and Resentment,' being reasonable means that individuals do not exclusively depend on factors beyond their control. What individuals think to be right is relevant for what they do. There cannot be any form of naturalistic determination that excludes reasoning itself. Nida-Rümelin takes the argument against the reduction of logic to psychology (Frege, Husserl) as an argument in favor of the gradual autonomy of reason. In being able to reason logically, individuals follows logical laws that cannot be identified with psychological or neurophysiological data. Additionally, Nida-Rümelin takes the insights of Alonzo Church and Kurt Gödel from the 1930s regarding non-computability showing that reasoning cannot be exclusively algorithmic. As a naturalist position takes causal processes to be algorithmic, reasoning cannot be naturalized. Humanism in Nida-Rümelin's sense therefore excludes deductionist naturalism.

Nida-Rümelin spent five years (1998–2002) in politics, first as Head of the Municipal Department of Arts & Culture of the Bavarian state capital Munich. Then he held a ministerial office as the State Minister for Culture and Media and was thus a member of the national government of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. During his time in office, Nida-Rümelin voiced criticism on the implementation of the Bologna Process, the European reform process of higher education. In 2014, he criticized German policies aiming to increase the tertiary education rates and recommended instead to further foster the German "dual system" of vocational training. His book How the rush to universities is leading to a crisis of professional and academic education stimulated a nationwide debate on education policy.

Nida-Rümelin studied Philosophy, Physics, Mathematics and Political Sciences. In 1984, he completed his PhD in Philosophy at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where he obtained an assistant professorship, first at the Department of Philosophy and later at the Department of Political Sciences. In 1989, he was conferred the Habilitation (a German post-doctoral qualification) from the Philosophy Department of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. After a one-year visiting professorship at Minnesota State University, he was appointed Chair of the Center for Ethics in the Bio Sciences at Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen. From 1993 to 2003, he held a Chair of Philosophy at the University of Göttingen, before he became Chair of Political Theory and Philosophy at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Since 2009, Nida-Rühmelin is Chair of Philosophy and Political Theory at the Department of Philosophy. He served as Dean of the Philosophy Faculty from 2009 until 2012 and as Deputy Dean thereafter. From 2011 until 2016, he was Speaker of the Munich Center for Ethics.

Julian Nida-Rümelin (born 28 November 1954) is a German philosopher and public intellectual. He served as State Minister for Culture of the Federal Republic of Germany under Chancellor Schröder. He was Professor of Philosophy and Political Theory at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich until 2020. Nida-Rümelin is Vice-Chair of the German Ethics Council.