tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-45232730015936533112024-03-14T02:07:27.622-07:00NDPR mirrorMirrors ndpr.nd.edu for purposes of creating an (unofficial) RSS feedRichard Y Chappellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.comBlogger771110tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4523273001593653311.post-57147030362560414112011-08-08T19:40:00.000-07:002011-08-08T19:40:02.426-07:00New feed addressThe good folks at NDPR have <a href="http://ndpr.nd.edu/free-subscription/">created an official RSS feed</a>, available at the following address:<br />
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P.S. Currently the official feed appears to include only excerpts, rather than the full posts. But if you do a google search for "full rss feeds", you can find various services which will allow you to convert the partial feed into a full one. (<a href="http://www.wizardrss.com/feed/feeds2.feedburner.com/PhilosophicalReviews/News">Example</a>)Richard Y Chappellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4523273001593653311.post-11927151927340945002011-08-08T15:55:00.000-07:002011-08-08T16:26:58.656-07:00NDPR: Today's ReviewsNOTRE DAME PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEWS<p>Derek Parfit, On What Matters, Volumes 1 and 2, Oxford University Press, <br>2011, 592 + 848pp., $55.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780199265923.<br>Reviewed by Mark Schroeder, University of Southern California<p>It is finally here. Wrapped in a stunning jacket design featuring the author's <br>own photographs and embossed gold and black titling, the two massive <br>volumes of Derek Parfit's On What Matters will be the most beautiful <br>philosophy books on any shelf they grace -- a worthy start to living up to over <br>a decade of being "the most eagerly awaited book in philosophy", according to <br>Oxford University Press's promotion materials. <p>Read more: <a href="http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/25393-on-what-matters-volumes-1-and-
2/">http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/25393-on-what-matters-volumes-1-and-<br>2/</a><p>----------------------------------------------------------------<p>David Chalmers, The Character of Consciousness, Oxford University Press, <br>2010, 596pp., $29.95 (pbk), ISBN 9780195311112.<p>Reviewed by Joseph Levine, University of Massachusetts Amherst<p>Since bursting onto the philosophical scene in the mid-nineties, David <br>Chalmers has established himself as a significant figure in philosophy of mind <br>and metaphysics. <p>Read more: <a href="http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/25394-the-character-of-consciousness/">http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/25394-the-character-of-consciousness/</a>Richard Y Chappellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4523273001593653311.post-52713437551999082292011-07-28T11:10:00.000-07:002011-07-28T11:12:59.018-07:00NDPR Naomi Scheman, Shifting Ground: Knowledge and Reality, Transgression and Trustworthiness <p><font size="4">Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews</font></p> <p><font size="2">2011-07-40 : <a href="http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=24341">View this Review Online</a> : <a href="http://ndpr.nd.edu/">View Other NDPR Reviews</a></font></p> <p>Naomi Scheman, <em>Shifting Ground: Knowledge and Reality, Transgression and Trustworthiness</em>, Oxford University Press, 2011, 251pp., $35.00 (pbk), ISBN 9780195395105.</p> <p><font size="2"><strong>Reviewed by Pieranna Garavaso, University of Minnesota Morris</strong></font></p> <div id="hr"><hr /></div> <div class="Section1"> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT"> <meta name="Title" content=""> <meta name="Keywords" content=""> <meta equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> <meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document"> <meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 2008"> <meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 2008"> <link rel="File-List" href="file://localhost/Users/ggutting/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/msoclip/0clip_filelist.xml"> <style> </style> <p class="MsoNormal"><b style="">NDPR IS SWITCHING TO A NEW WEBSITE AND WILL NOT BE ABLE TO POST OR EMAIL ANY NEW REVIEWS UNTIL AUGUST 4.<o:p></o:p></b></font></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b style=""><o:p> </o:p></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b style="">FROM AUGUST 4<sup>TH</sup> ON, EMAIL SUBSCRIBERS WILL RECEIVE ONE MAILING FOR EACH DAY OF PUBLICATION, WITH LINKS TO EACH OF THE REVIEWS PUBLISHED THAT DAY.<o:p></o:p></b></p> </p><p class="NDPRBodyTexT">The eleven essays of this volume -- all published between 1995 and 2008 - are grouped around three main subjects: four essays are devoted to Knowledge; three to Reality; and the last four to Transgression and Trustworthiness. The theoretical areas covered in the essays are unrelated, "possibly hostile to one another," (4) for each essay was written in response to a specific request and is directed to a specific audience. Short and interesting introductions to the different sections provide the history of individual essays and connect them with essays in other sections. These writings display a feature shared by much feminist philosophy and distinctive of Naomi Scheman's work: core philosophical issues such as objectivity, personal identity, and the nature of the ultimate reality are examined from marginalized perspectives or in connection with topics not commonly discussed within analytic philosophy, such as the identity of transsexuals and Jews, community based research, or teaching for social justice. Scheman's writing style is intriguing and never dull; there is much cleverness and insight in this body of work; some passages and one or two essays are denser than the others and may be better appreciated after slower or repeated reading. The footnotes provide a glimpse of the broad scholarship that nourishes Scheman's work and contain excellent suggestions for further reading.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT"> </p><p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Epistemology is at the center of Scheman's thinking as it dominates all sections, even the one devoted to ontology. She defends a form of practical, i.e., politically engaged, standpoint naturalized epistemology (10-11). This epistemology concerns the epistemic problems of real people; it recognizes the impossibility of giving abstract and absolute notions of objectivity and truth. Throughout the articles one can see the influence of Wittgenstein's thought as Scheman gives special attention to language in practice and to forms of life. Moreover, Scheman seems to share Wittgenstein's critical approach to mainstream philosophy, whether on the apprehension of language or on the existence of mind-independent meanings. She approaches philosophical questions from marginalized standpoints and repeatedly calls into question attempts to generalize any specific point of view. The question "Who do we mean by 'we'?" is often explicitly raised and at other times tacitly implied. Unlike Wittgenstein, though, Scheman stresses the political dimensions of any philosophical theorizing: "We have entered post-modernity characterized by a politics of difference" (6); this new phase arises from the demise of the ideals of modernity and liberalism. The main aim of the collection is to articulate "a 'postmodern' epistemology, which puts diversity and a politics of social justice in place of the universalistic abstract individualism that have [sic] framed the epistemology and politics of modernity" (12). Accordingly, in several articles Scheman attempts to give "robust, usable articulations" of the notion of objectivity. We will come back later to the question whether or not this interesting move is fully successful.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">The section on Knowledge contains two essays focused on theoretical issues and two essays focused on identity as an epistemic stance. "Non-Negotiable Demands: Metaphysics, Politics, and the Discourse of Needs" centers on the demands at the origin of philosophical theories and argues that such demands cannot be met; furthermore, if these demands were met, they would not satisfy the needs from which they arise. Three traditional philosophical problems are discussed: realism versus idealism; universal moral standards; and privileged access. Here, we see Scheman performing a move which is repeated with regard to different issues in other parts of the volume, i.e., transposing century old and prima facie thoroughly abstract problems under the new guises of hotly political contemporary concerns, e.g., the reenactment of the debate between those who assert and those who deny the existence of a mind-independent reality as the question of which type of realism can best capture "the real needs of the marginalized or subordinated" (25), or which realism can be as rigorous about the knowing subjects as it is about the objects of knowledge.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">The second chapter, "Feminist Epistemology," was presented during a 1994 APA panel exchange with Louise Antony. Antony's commentary and Scheman's reply to it, which are not reprinted here, appeared in print in <i style="">Metaphilosophy</i> the following year. Two main aims of the article are to argue that there should be a field called feminist epistemology and to give an idea of the work done in this area. The second part focuses on the development of a non-individualistic notion of the epistemic subject, on the epistemic relevance of uneven social and political power, and on the critique of objectivity as the goal of knowledge and of the reigning normative epistemic standards.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">"On Waking Up One Morning and Discovering We Are Them" is the first of two autobiographical essays. It focuses on how to be a radical academic while teaching undergraduate and graduate students. Unlike many women philosophers who experienced discrimination and sexual harassment -- see for example the narratives collected by Linda Martín Alcoff in <i style="">Singing in the Fire</i> (2003) -- Scheman, by her own admission, represents a lucky exception (53). This thoughtful narrative refutes the stereotypes that appear in attacks to radical feminist academics such as those contained in some of Christina Hoff Sommers' articles.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">The second autobiographical essay focuses on Jewish identity. A terminal moraine is the residue of rock fragments left by a receding glacier; in the essay that takes its title from it, the terminal moraine is a metaphor for the Jewish location: "To grow up on terminal moraine is to grow up on the unnarratable fragments of other people's stories. . . . The experience for which I am evoking the image of terminal moraine is that of having the ground under one's feet be that of other people's stories." (67-68)</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">The reality discussed in the essays in Part II is not so much the focus of traditional ontology, but rather a reality inspired by Wittgenstein's metaphor of the 'rough ground,' i.e., our practices and forms of life. In "Against Physicalism," Scheman rejects physicalism, defined as the view that explanations of human behaviors and mental life based on beliefs, intentions, emotions, desires, and attitudes refer to events, states, and processes identical to, or dependent on or determined by, events, states, or processes in the body of the person to whom the behavior or mental life are ascribed (84). Instead she claims that </p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">beliefs, desires, emotions, and other phenomena of our mental lives are the particulars that they are because they are socially meaningful, and when they figure as those particulars in causal accounts, neither those accounts nor the phenomena that figure in them survive abstraction from social context (83-84). </p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">At the beginning of this essay, Scheman characterizes "most" contemporary analytic philosophy as naturalized, i.e., as claiming that "the physical sciences are the lodestone both for epistemology and for ontology." (81) As much as I wish it were true, this seems to me inaccurate and refuted by the still ongoing debates about the normative but not descriptive role of philosophy (just as a recent example of non-naturalized analytic philosophy, see Christian Barth's <i style="">Objectivity and the language-dependence of thought : a transcendental defence of universal lingualism</i> (2011).</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">"Feeling Our Way toward Moral Objectivity" is an essay on the borderline between ethics and cognitive science. Scheman argues for two main theses. The first is the denial that emotions are states of individuals; their identity as complex entities is based on explanatory schemes that gain a meaning only after being interpreted within social contexts (98). The second thesis argues that, contrary to common opinion, emotions are not obstacles to, but instead facilitators for, the achievement of objectivity in moral judgments (104). Very much in agreement with Helen Longino's conception of scientific objectivity, Scheman regards objective moral judgments as those that have "come out and been subjected to the critical workings of a sufficiently democratic community" (107).</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">The starting point of "Queering the Center by Centering the Queer: Reflections on Transsexuals and Secular Jews" is the conflict between two goals for the marginalized: either to integrate with the privileged as much as possible or to disrupt the norm. In arguing for a better way out of this dichotomy, Scheman defends the role of relational notions of memory and narrativity in the creation of a self: "Narrativity <i style="">per se</i> may be humanly important, but we have no access to narrativity <i style="">per se</i>: What we have are culturally specific narratives, which facilitate the smooth telling of some lives and straitjacket, distort, or fracture others." (113) A comparison and contrast between Jewish identity and the identity of transsexuals leads to the finding of a certain unavoidable level of ambiguity in the identities of those who are marginalized: "the experiences of variously marginalized people provide alternative models of subjectivity, less seamless and transparent, less coherent and solid, than those of privilege" (144).</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">The focus of the third and last part of the collection is the future and how we may want to start the work of transformation of philosophy, which the previous sections have shown to be necessary, if we want to pay attention to the 'real needs' of those who discuss philosophical problems. "Forms of Life: Mapping the Rough Ground" starts from the problem of finding a viable notion of objectivity without any commitment to the view that Wittgenstein rejected throughout his whole life, i.e., the idea that there is a mind-independent reality and that only some correspondence with such a reality can make a thesis true and objective or a practice objectively correct. Scheman points out, "where one can stand to obtain a perspective on a set of practices that is simultaneously informed and critical is a deep and central question for political theory," especially with regard to "multiculturalism" (150). Here is another example of Scheman's ability to connect philosophical perspectives not at the center of mainstream or analytical debate to core problems such as the opposition between objectivity and relativism.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">The next two articles are markedly different from the others in this collection and their difference is a powerful testament to the seriousness with which Scheman takes the commitment of philosophers and epistemologists to produce engaged and practical knowledge. "The Trustworthiness of Research: The Paradigm of Community-Based Research" is coauthored with Catherine Jordan, a pediatric neuropsychologist, and Susan Gust, a community organizer. The authors argue for "a fundamental shift in the academic research culture, a shift that takes the ethos of community-based participatory research (CBPR) as the preferred approach to instilling trust in the research enterprise" (170). One interesting contrast is between the exclusive mutual trust shared by the scientists engaged in research governed by the Standard Norms of customary laboratory science and the trust between scientists and community arising from CBPR. After outlining and defending the main features of CBPR, this article provides a report on the results of an actual example of CBPR, i.e., a study to address the concerns regarding lead poisoning in the Phillips Community in Minneapolis and on the initiatives originating from this study. "Narrative, Complexity, and Context: Autonomy as an Epistemic Value" has also a connection with a real life example of CBPR, namely the usefulness of narratives in the acknowledgment and protection of the autonomy of patients in relationships with doctors and nurses. This paper discusses the epistemology of naturalized and narrative bioethics, i.e., bioethics grounded in the specificities of practice and in the stories told by the different participants in those practices. Scientists can do their work best, especially from an epistemic point of view, "only insofar as they think of themselves and the knowledge they create as framed by, and responsible to, the relationships in which, whether they recognize it or not, they are enmeshed." (206).</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">The last article, "Epistemology Resuscitated: Objectivity as Trustworthiness," provides a fit ending for the collection as it is characterized by both the epistemological focus dear to the author and by a tight link between Scheman's theoretical and political commitments. The paper was motivated by the "science wars" of the 1990s and was meant as a defense of that part of feminist epistemology and philosophy of science that is most friendly to the notion of objectivity against the critics who claimed that the feminist criticisms of traditional science methods together with the criticisms coming from postmodern cultural theorists destroy all notions of objectivity. Scheman strives to save objectivity and interprets the work of feminist philosophy of science as </p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">developing accounts of objectivity that take seriously our need for it: If objectivity is an instrumental good, then it has actually to function so as to produce the good it promises: what we label 'objective' has actually to be worthy of our trust and the trust of a diverse range of others. (210) </p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Scheman proposes a type of objectivity that arises from a community of research when community members are included in the process and work on the project alongside scientists, when trust ensues between community and scientists.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">This volume rewards its readers with the breadth of its topics and a writing style that captivates the readers' attention. From this body of work emerges a position that is as intriguing as it is problematic, for it strives to weave together two approaches to philosophy that seem prima facie antithetical. Scheman's epistemology is naturalized and yet she wants to incorporate also a Wittgensteinian appeal to practices and forms of life. However, Wittgenstein explicitly and repeatedly rejected a naturalistic approach to philosophical inquiry and many of his contemporary interpreters appeal to him exactly to bolster a non-naturalized philosophy, e.g., Avrum Stroll and <span style="line-height: 115%;">D<span style="">anièle Moyal-Sharrock.</span></span> I am not raising the question whether Scheman is reading Wittgenstein correctly as she is clearly not interested in exegesis, but rather in letting Wittgenstein's insights guide her thinking. My question is rather how two perspectives, i.e., naturalism on one side and a Wittgensteinian appeal to the normativity of practices and forms of life on the other, can ever be successfully weaved together. Scheman seems to acknowledge at least one version of this conflict when she states, "Those who hold on to internalist conceptions of scientific objectivity do so in part because they believe that a naturalized account of science as a social practice is a wholly different endeavor from a normative account of it as truth producing" (231). The only regret I am left with after reading this book is that I wish I had found in it a more explicit discussion <a name="_GoBack"></a>of how to accomplish this synthesis.</p> </div> Richard Y Chappellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4523273001593653311.post-60840731766843429742011-07-28T11:09:00.001-07:002011-07-28T11:09:56.858-07:00NDPR Michel Weber, Whitehead's Pancreativism: Jamesian Applications <p><font size="4">Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews</font></p> <p><font size="2">2011-07-38 : <a href="http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=24339">View this Review Online</a> : <a href="http://ndpr.nd.edu/">View Other NDPR Reviews</a></font></p> <p>Michel Weber, <em>Whitehead's Pancreativism: Jamesian Applications</em>, Ontos, 2011, 286pp., $139.95 (hbk), ISBN 9783868381030.</p> <p><font size="2"><strong>Reviewed by Joseph A. Bracken, S.J., Xavier University</strong></font></p> <div id="hr"><hr /></div> <div class="Section1"> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Michel Weber has worked hard to make the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead better known and appreciated. With Will Desmond, for example, he was the editor of <i style="">Handbook of Process Thought </i>(Ontos, 2008), which contained 113 entries by 101 scholars from around the globe. Likewise, in the academic series <i style="">Process Thought</i>, edited by Nicholas Rescher, Johanna Seibt and Weber, Weber published <i style="">Whitehead's Pancreativism: The Basics</i> in 2006 and now <i style="">Whitehead's Pancreativism: Jamesian Applications</i> in 2011. As the title indicates, he aims in this book to show the influence of James on Whitehead's intellectual formation and the pertinence of Whitehead's philosophy for understanding James' notion of "radical empiricism". <span style=""> </span>There are some additional chapters setting forth his own thoughts on the value of "radical empiricism" for psychotherapy, economics and politics. In an opening chapter, he explores the specific points where the influence of James on Whitehead was most evident: the epochal theory of time or ontological atomism, the notion of feeling as the bond between successive moments of experience, the denial of the soul as a spiritual substance, and the prerequisite of solitude for religious experience (18-25). Then he contrasts James' celebrated distinction between rationality, irrationality and non-rationality (the priority of life over logic) with Whitehead's reformed subjectivist principle: philosophy starts and ends with experience so that the Universe is constituted by "the interweaving of experiencing subjects and experienced objects." (86). So, while the reflective consciousness found in classical metaphysics tends to be dualistic and substantialistic, radical empiricism is non-dualistic and processive.</font></p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT"> </p><p class="NDPRBodyTexT">In subsequent chapters Weber contrasts James' notion of "pure experience" as the mixture of subjectivity and objectivity with Whitehead's categories of actual entity and society. Actual entities are discontinuous but ordered to one another serially so that there is a flow of feeling from one actual entity to its successor(s) so as to produce a felt continuity (104-113). He likewise makes clear the affinity between James and Whitehead with regard to "first-hand" and "second-hand" religious experiences. First-hand religious experience is private and non-rational; second-hand religious experience is public and rational. First-hand religious experience has to do with spirituality; a feeling-level response to an all-embracing Other; second-hand religious experience has to do with institutional religion and one's participation in its various rituals and doctrinal beliefs. So, while Whitehead and James would agree that "religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness" (Whitehead, <i style="">Religion in the Making</i>, 16), Whitehead, as a more systematic thinker than James, also sees the value of "rational religion," a system of general truths which have the effect of transforming character when they are sincerely held and vividly apprehended" (<i style="">Religion in the Making</i>, 15). Weber also takes note of James' belief in a "continuum of cosmic consciousness" in which "subject and object, subject and subject, grow together and reciprocally (com-)prehend themselves" (172). Whitehead, in turn, specified that all actual entities are subject/superjects; thus all entities are both experiencing and experienced, observer and object observed.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">In three concluding chapters of his book, Weber ranges farther afield in his espousal of radical empiricism. In the first, he compares the world views of Whitehead and the systemic psychotherapy of Paul Watzlawick. According to Watzlawick, classical psychoanalysis is "first and foremost, monadic, intrapsychic, in its essence: it deals with an isolated individual understood from the general perspective of a school (Freudian, Jungian, Lacanian . . . )" (189). The analyst tries to understand the deviant behavior of the client in terms of the understanding of the psyche already laid out by Freud, Jung, Lacan, etc. Normally, it takes a long time for the analyst to determine why the client exhibits deviant behavior and then to correct it by attacking its principle or source within the psyche of the client. What Watzlawick called "brief therapy" is "systemic, polyadic. It deals with an interconnected actor from his/her own particular point of view. . . What matters is the present complaint of the patient, and the rapid reform of the symptoms" (189). It deals with the "how" of a cure here and now rather than the "why" of a problem from a particular scientific perspective. There are thus two different ontologies at work here: "One emphasizes deterministic continuity amid change and linear causation; the other, free change amid continuity and retroactive causation [feedback causation]" (194).</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">In the next chapter Weber analyzes the relevance of Whitehead's radical empiricism and pragmatic attitude to life ("to live, to live well, to live better" from <i style="">The Function of Reason</i>). We do not live in a cosmos (a closed or fully determined world) but a chaosmos (an open, only partially ordered world). Yet human beings should still be able to set up a living civilization, grounded in persuasive rather than coercive power, which seeks harmony and relies on a strong sense of the individual-in-community rather than the isolated self-centered individual (214). But unhappily, contemporary Westerners live in a society strongly structured by opposite goals and values, a dystopia rather than a utopia (the dystopia of Aldous Huxley's <i style="">Brave New World </i>versus the utopia of his later novel <i style="">Island). </i>Likewise, Weber makes reference to R. D. Laing's <i style="">The Politics of Experience</i>, which argues for the acceptance of all experiences and only experiences so as not to prejudge the mental health of an individual or of society using a priori concepts. Weber concludes: first, that speculative philosophy like any other scientific discipline should start from experience, not abstract principles; secondly, that generalizations extracted from experience should function to deepen experience; thirdly, that "one should distinguish, but not bring into conflict, the objective and subjective dimensions of experience." (240).</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">In the final chapter Weber begins with a pair of questions: what is philosophy, and who are philosophers? The answer to the first question is that philosophy functions to naturalize religious myth: "Everything that exists is natural; human beings, the divine, the World form a unified world manifesting the same living power" (249). The answer to the second question is that there are three kinds of philosophers: the living philosopher, the philosopher-expert, and the critical philosopher (249-257). The living philosopher, with William James as the archetypal example, claims that philosophy should assist in living an authentic life. The philosopher-expert is the academic who seeks public recognition by his/her one-sided attack on rival positions. The critical philosopher, exemplified by Whitehead, seeks rational coherence within a philosophy to live by. The way to such a critical philosophy is to admit that, while all experiences have to be taken into account, the most significant do not occur within consciousness-zero or common sense experience. In pure experience, we first experience a felt Whole (<i style="">Umwelt</i>) and only later experience ourselves as subjects and experience the world as divided into different kinds of objects (267). A lived philosophy emphasizes the felt Whole; analytical philosophy seeks to distinguish between parts and then order them to one another. Radical empiricism demands that both be taken into account: </p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">The philosopher defines for herself the horizon of her questioning, [realizing that] the wider the horizon the more inclusive the thought. But this shouldn't prevent however the philosopher to narrow the scope of his inquiry -- provided that the initial horizon is somehow kept in the background. (274)</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">An evaluation and critique of this book is not easy to write. On the one hand, while many historians of modern philosophy have tended to align James with Charles Sanders Peirce in terms of pragmatism and an approach to truth-claims in terms of foreseen consequences, Weber tries to explore the affinity of James and Whitehead in terms of radical empiricism with its emphasis on individuality and difference in subjective experience. Many valuable insights into the philosophies of James and Whitehead are thereby gained, but at the price of following a line of thought which is often highly convoluted and hard to follow. This problem is compounded by some obvious inconsistencies in grammar and sometimes an inept choice of words. English is, of course, not Weber's first language; but he or his editor could have engaged the services of a professional proof-reader whose first language is English before publishing the book. Finally, there is no index of topics covered at the end of the book. This is a serious drawback to the utility of an academic publication intended for further scholarly work.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">My biggest misgivings with the philosophical conclusions of this book, however, lie elsewhere and may be disputed by Weber and other orthodox Whiteheadians as a misreading of the master's thought. Weber claims that human consciousness is distinguished by continuity amid discontinuity, but his emphasis is on discontinuity, the notion of drops of experience articulated first by James and later adopted by Whitehead, which allows for novelty and creativity. My own preoccupation would be with what is meant by continuity within an ever-changing world. In Whitehead's metaphysics, continuity is provided by the category of society, a succession of actual entities (drops of experience) linked by a flow of feeling (104-113) and a recurrence of pattern or structure in the succession of actual entities (180). For Weber this "contiguity" of feeling and objective pattern between successive actual entities is enough to account for the continuity of existence required by the notion of society; for me that supposition is not explanation enough.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Weber says, for example: "There is a trajectory of actualities-object crowned by an actuality-subject, soon to topple into objectivity and to be followed by a new concrescence" (111). What is this objectivity and where is it located? If one has in mind the consequent nature of God, the moment-by-moment unification of all the newly actualized actual entities in the cosmic process, one should remember that this is, properly speaking, the subjective experience of God as the necessary basis for new divine initial aims to the next generation of actual entities. It corresponds more to the way things should be rather than the way they in fact are. If one rather maintains that past actual entities are objectively present within the extensive continuum as "one relational complex in which all potential objectifications find their niche" (Whitehead, <i style="">Process and Reality</i>, 66), this begs the question of its place within Whitehead's metaphysical scheme. As something which "underlies the whole world, past, present and future" (<i style="">Process and Reality</i>, 66), the extensive continuum seems to be related to the divine primordial nature, "the unlimited conceptual realization of the absolute wealth of potentiality" (<i style="">Process and Reality</i>, 345), but here too one has to ask whether this "relational complex" is part of God's subjective experience or something existing as an objective reality in its own right. Elsewhere in <i style="">Process and Reality</i>, to be sure, Whitehead refers to the actual world as "a community of entities which are settled actual, and already become" (65). But this statement is ambiguous, given Whitehead's other claim: "In the philosophy of organism it is not 'substance' which is permanent, but 'form.' Forms suffer changing relations; actual entities 'perpetually perish' subjectively, but are immortal objectively" (<i style="">Process and Reality</i>, 29). So forms survive presumably as the patterns of self-constitution of past actual entities, but once again where are they located: in the subjective experience of God and of newly concrescing finite actual entities, or in the world as an objective reality existing in its own right?</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">My own solution to this evident ambiguity in Whitehead's metaphysical scheme is to postulate that "societies" are enduring fields of activity or environments structured by the dynamic interrelation of their constituent actual entities from moment to moment. The prevailing structure of the field thereby conditions the concrescence or self-constitution of constituent actual entities from moment to moment, but successive generations of actual entities by their dynamic interrelation alter the structure of the field within which they emerge and to which they contribute their individual pattern of self-constitution before expiring as subjects of experience. So there is an objective reality apart from the subjectivity of God and finite actual entities: namely, the world as a hierarchy of fields within fields, the byproduct or result of the conjoint activity of God and finite actual entities from moment to moment. But, to be fair to Weber, my position is more neo-Whiteheadian than Whiteheadian. Given Whitehead's "reformed subjectivist principle" ("apart from the experience of subjects . . . there is bare nothingness" [<i style="">Process and Reality</i>, 167]) and his ontological principle formulated as "no actual entity, then no reason" (<i style="">Process and Reality</i>, 19), then Weber is a true Whiteheadian and as a result an advocate of radical empiricism, and I am not (at least not without further qualification).<i style=""><o:p></o:p></i></p> </div> Richard Y Chappellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4523273001593653311.post-38023138097243805372011-07-28T11:06:00.000-07:002011-07-28T11:10:56.995-07:00NDPR Ryan Pevnick, Immigration and the Constraints of Justice: Between Open Borders and Absolute Sovereignty <p><font size="4">Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews</font></p> <p><font size="2">2011-07-39 : <a href="http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=24340">View this Review Online</a> : <a href="http://ndpr.nd.edu/">View Other NDPR Reviews</a></font></p> <p>Ryan Pevnick, <em>Immigration and the Constraints of Justice: Between Open Borders and Absolute Sovereignty</em>, Cambridge University Press, 2011, 199pp., $82.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780521768986.</p> <p><font size="2"><strong>Reviewed by James Hudson, Northern Illinois University</strong></font></p> <div id="hr"><hr /></div> <div class="Section1">As suggested by his subtitle, Ryan Pevnick aims to offer a moderate view of the ethical constraints on immigration policy, a compromise between libertarianism and what he calls "statism" -- this latter being the view that a nation and its citizens have no responsibility at all to foreigners who wish to immigrate and so may freely exclude them. His position is thus comfortably non-extremist. In his view, countries such as the United States (which is his focus, though much of the discussion aims at greater generality) have some rather weighty responsibilities to admit very poor or victimized foreigners (to permanent residency and, eventually, to citizenship), but are not unjust or otherwise morally blameworthy for excluding most would-be immigrants. <p class="NDPRBodyTexT"> </font></p><p class="NDPRBodyTexT">In support of this position Pevnick offers his "associative ownership" theory -- not a general theory of sovereignty, but an account of an aspect of sovereignty that is especially relevant to immigration policy. On this theory the true citizens of a country are those who have helped to create or maintain its political institutions (and perhaps some of its non-political social institutions: the range of the relevant institutions is not made quite clear). These people have, as individuals and (I think we must add) as a collection, something very much like a <i style="">property right</i> in their nation. Strictly speaking, the property right is in the nation's <i style="">institutions</i>, but Pevnick claims that in practice these will be inextricably linked with a certain <i style="">territory</i>. This quasi-property-right gives them considerable latitude in preventing others from enjoying the benefits of living under those institutions and, therefore, in that territory. <i style="">Considerable latitude</i>, but not <i style="">a completely free hand</i>: they are, and their nation as a whole is, still bound by certain constraints of morality or justice in treating would-be immigrants.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Thus Pevnick rejects "statism" by (plausibly enough) upholding the moral requirement (which he considers a requirement of <i style="">justice</i>) of "rescue" -- a requirement to help others who are in dire need and whom one has the means to help without greatly sacrificing his own interests, a requirement that applies regardless of the nationality of the potential beneficiaries. But as a merely individualistic principle, applying just to the actions of individual people, this would not obviously serve Pevnick's purpose; <i style="">my</i> duty as an individual American to any particular needy foreigner seems intuitively to be quite slender. Implicitly Pevnick is giving the principle a collectivist extension, so that it binds the actions not only of individuals but also of such collective entities as <i style="">nations</i>. It is normally the nation as a whole, not any individual citizen, that determines its immigration policy; and clearly the sacrifice incurred by a nation in allowing any particular foreigner to immigrate is relatively small.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Now, the United States (in particular) does partially conform its actions to the rescue principle by admitting refugees from war and from persecution. But it does not acknowledge what Pevnick sees as its considerable obligation to allow entry to <i style="">desperately poor</i> foreigners who are unable to gain a decent living in their own countries. Here Pevnick makes his closest approach to a policy proposal that is in any way <i style="">radical</i> -- that is, not squarely within the mainstream of practical political discussion in the U.S.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Pevnick does not tell us at what point this collective obligation would lapse if there were so many extremely poor foreigners that admitting them all would be seriously harmful to the nation. Nor does he consider the suggestion that the responsibility to provide opportunities for these desperately poor people falls primarily upon other governments, not on that of the U.S. (I follow Pevnick in ignoring the distinction between a nation and its government.) Nor does he consider other measures the U.S. government might take to help the foreign desperately poor besides admitting them to the country as immigrants. These omissions prevent his support for an open-door policy toward "economic refugees" from being fully convincing.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">By setting up statism as a fundamental principle of political morality, Pevnick easily finds intuitive grounds to reject it. But its advocates might better view it as a derivative, secondary rule, holding that <i style="">under present international political circumstances</i> it is generally best not to treat nations as being morally bound to look after the well-being of people not under their jurisdiction. The derivative-statist would maintain that world affairs are at present so structured that, in the long run, each nation had best concentrate on serving its own (enlightened) self-interest. Pevnick does not address this more modest version of statism, the evaluation of which would require a rather messy enquiry into empirical matters.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Pevnick follows the common practice of political philosophers by moralizing about collective actions, the agents of which are collective entities such as nations, more or less as if they were individual actions performed by individual people. But arguably he, and they, should give more attention to whether a collectivist morality modeled on the familiar individualist morality can simply be <i style="">added to</i> the latter without producing conflicts.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Obviously Pevnick's commitment to "associative ownership" is a sort of rejection not only of statism but also of the libertarian "open borders" view. I call it a "sort of" rejection, for in passing Pevnick often shows himself to be sympathetic to a very open immigration policy for the U.S. He writes: "Sidgwick argues that though open borders policies are not requirements of justice, they are nevertheless [usually] optimal. I do not wish to rule out <i style="">this</i> kind of argument in favor of open borders." (p. 80) But neither does he put forward such an argument himself, which would require -- besides much empirical material -- that he spell out his overall theoretical normative view, specifying (for example) how he thinks <i style="">justice</i>, <i style="">optimality</i>, and perhaps other considerations figure into the larger moral picture. Instead he contents himself with a rather vague intuitionism, in which potentially conflicting intuitions about rights, distributive justice, the production of utility, and whatnot are weighed against each other by a sort of meta-intuitive faculty, in a style made familiar by W. D. Ross. Given constraints of space under which he was operating, this may have been the most practical course.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Pevnick is at pains to distinguish his view from its close cousin, the culturally communitarian "shared identity" view (which he also calls "liberal nationalism"). On one version of "shared identity," "the possibility of a just society depends on citizens sharing a common public culture or national identity." (p. 14) But as Pevnick sees it, the important justification for excluding foreigners is not that they fail to participate in the citizens' <i style="">cultural community</i> and their consequent <i style="">mutual cultural bond</i> -- as he remarks, <i style="">some</i> foreigners may in fact be culturally similar to the average citizen -- but that, unlike the citizens, the foreigners have not <i style="">earned a stake</i> in the local political institutions. He brushes aside the shared-identity theorist's empirical claim about a necessary cultural precondition for the practical institution of justice, pressing instead his own argument about the direct requirements of justice in the abstract.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Pevnick's presentation of his associative ownership view is rather sketchy, leaving unanswered many important questions about citizenship. I doubt that he can give a satisfactory account of the extent of original citizenship in a newly founded nation, but let us put that aside. Even for the task of specifying what one must do to merit full membership <i style="">in an already-existing nation</i> his account is insufficiently detailed. As he would have it, present-day membership is a matter of somehow having contributed to the modification and the maintenance of the national institutions; but we are not told if these institutions are the purely political ones, or whether other social institutions -- linguistic, religious, esthetic, broadly "moral" (manners, customs, dress, etc.) -- might be relevant. There is also a (notably circular) rider -- aimed at undermining the claim of a long-time resident illegal alien -- that in order to qualify him for citizenship a person's contribution must be made with the <i style="">consent</i> of the other citizens. The <i style="">extent</i> of the contribution required for citizenship is not specified (nor is the anti-contribution -- the destructive or subversive activity -- that would forfeit citizenship); many other such questions are not addressed.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">The idea of citizens as being, at least in the first instance, those who have <i style="">earned</i> a quasi-property-right in the national institutions has considerable appeal and may well figure in the popular view of immigration issues. Pevnick had done well to highlight it, and it merits a yet more detailed development than he has been able to give it here. But while its merits are evident in broad outline, a more detailed examination might well reveal insurmountable flaws.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">A particularly noticeable omission from Pevnick's account concerns the possible <i style="">alienability</i> of the individual citizen's quasi-property-right: may he voluntarily transfer it to someone else, as bequest or gift, or in trade? Pevnick's appeal to Locke (Chapter 2, section III, <i style="">et passim</i>) suggests an affirmative answer, since Lockean property is transferable; but the rest of his discussion seems to assume a negative one.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Assuming inalienability, a citizen may not bequeath citizenship to even one of his or her children, and obviously babies have not contributed politically (or socially); yet many babies are treated as citizens (though others are excluded). It seems to me that Pevnick will have to view this recognition as a sort of arbitrary gift from the citizenry as a whole, thus treating the collectivist property right, unlike the individualist one, as including alienability.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Indeed, in the United States, though not in many other nations, not only do the children of citizens get citizenship by right of birth: non-citizens' children <i style="">who are born in America</i> are granted this privilege. What does Pevnick's theory imply about the propriety of this treatment of babies?</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">His explicit statement implies that even the American rule is, in a way, <i style="">too restrictive</i>: for he holds that all people, even children of illegal immigrants, who from fairly early childhood (not necessarily from <i style="">birth</i>) have grown up in the U.S., with little exposure to any other culture, deserve recognition as American citizens. On the other hand, his overall position seems not to require him to endorse birthright citizenship in general: a baby born in the U.S. but reared in some other country would have no principled claim to U.S. citizenship.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Though much of his treatise is quite general, Pevnick often focuses on the case of the present-day United States. In a somewhat tantalizing aside, he writes: "The considerations relevant to the United States are insufficient for considering the legitimacy, for example, of Israeli immigration policy." (p. 18) Yet he gives the case of Israel almost no consideration. Let me suggest that no general treatment of immigration can afford thus to ignore cases of the Israeli type.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">As a coda to the main corpus of the book -- his general presentation of "associative ownership" and his criticism of statism and Open Borders -- Pevnick discusses and favorably evaluates the possibility of a guest-worker program for the present-day United States, suggesting improvements over the twentieth-century bracero program. One of his arguments for a (humane, generous, and quite large) guest-worker program is the <i style="">impracticality</i> of strictly enforcing a strongly exclusionary immigration policy. But this is a consideration that comports ill with the highly abstract considerations that dominated the rest of the book. He asserts that, while the U.S. has the right utterly to exclude non-distressed foreigners, enforcing such a ban would require draconian measures that would prevent the achievement of other more important goals. But might not some of these goals be <i style="">morally required</i>, in which case the U.S. would not, after all, have the right to exclude? After the highly abstract deontological theorizing (involving rights, justice, and the like) of the main body of the book, it is somewhat jarring to find considerations about the <i style="">practicability</i> of various rules thus brought in late: should they not have been raised earlier?</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Pevnick does not mention any limitation on the duration of guest-worker status; for all he says, it might last until the worker's retirement or death, without earning him citizenship rights. But guest workers must be adults; where children are concerned, denial of citizenship is objectionable, because (normally) they will not have had the chance to develop ties to the culture of their parents' nation. Here, as throughout, Pevnick relies on a sharp distinction between adulthood and childhood, with his treatment of children fitting easily into the cultural communitarian framework that he rejects in application to adults. (He emphasizes the inability of foreign-born children raised in the U.S. to form ties to the foreign nation's culture, rather than their inability to <i style="">make contributions to</i> the foreign nation's political institutions.) But there is no sharp distinction between child and adult. This fact, I suggest, constitutes a theoretical difficulty for Pevnick's view; he should, at least, have discussed the borderline cases -- adolescents. Admittedly, most of the considerations that figure in his discussions throughout the book are matters of degree, which can be reflected only imperfectly in the inevitably crude categories of law and public policy.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Despite its flaws, most of which are omissions (I find myself making the common reviewer's complaint that the book is too short), <i style="">Immigration and the Constraints of Justice</i> is quite a competent performance, expressing a plausible overall view with many sensible and some penetrating observations. It is a welcome contribution to the current debate on immigration policy.</p> </div> Richard Y Chappellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4523273001593653311.post-49131018565938558722011-07-27T22:40:00.001-07:002011-07-27T22:48:42.665-07:00NDPR Daniel O. Dahlstrom (ed.), Interpreting Heidegger: Critical Essays <p><font size="4">Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews</font></p> <p><font size="2">2011-07-37 : <a href="http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=24338">View this Review Online</a> : <a href="http://ndpr.nd.edu/">View Other NDPR Reviews</a></font></p> <p>Daniel O. Dahlstrom (ed.), <em>Interpreting Heidegger: Critical Essays</em>, Cambridge University Press, 2011, 301pp., $90.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780521764940.</p> <p><font size="2"><strong>Reviewed by Theodore Kisiel, Northern Illinois University</strong></font></p> <div id="hr"><hr /></div> <div class="Section1"> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Editor Dan Dahlstrom is quick to place this entire collection of "critical essays" under the Dilthey-Heideggerian preconception of the pan-hermeneutic character of human life: <i style="">Das Leben selbst legt sich aus</i>: "Life itself lays itself out, interprets itself, articulates itself." Aristotle's definition of humans as talking animals readily slips into our being "interpreting animals" irrevocably caught up in an interpretive process with "every move we make," thereby "elaborating, exposing, and shaping our self-understanding and, in the process, our relationships to ourselves, our world, and other things within the world." Moreover, having been thrown into this interpretive process of life willy-nilly, "our interpretations are not ours alone, but the often mindless yet time-tested iteration of a tradition of interpretations written into our most common practices and beliefs" (p. 1). The need for more thoughtful interpretations of this tradition of interpretations readily develops into some of the larger tasks assumed in the Heideggerian opus, like the need to interpret the entire history of Western thinking from its Greek beginnings to the present in order to come to terms with the "hermeneutic situation" of the revolutionary age in which we now find ourselves.</font></p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT"> </p><p class="NDPRBodyTexT">The essays are grouped into three divisions: I. Interpreting Heidegger's Philosophy; II. Interpreting Heidegger's Interpretations; III. Interpreting Heidegger's Critics.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">I.<i style=""> Interpreting Heidegger's Philosophy<o:p></o:p></i></p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Holger Zaborowski extends the pan-hermeneutic of human life to all of Heidegger's philosophy and thought, from the hermeneutics of facticity indigenous to human life to the more transcendental hermeneutics of self-interpreting Dasein to the later hermeneutics of (and first from) the propriating event (<i style="">Er-eignis</i>) of be-ing, which is explicated by way of <i style="">seynsgeschichtliches Denken</i>, thinking in accord with the history of be-ing. Its hermeneutic finds its focus in being responsive to, listening to, hearing and saying the word/call of/from be-ing proper to its time. </p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Tom Sheehan takes a similar tack in his essay entitled "Facticity and <i style="">Ereignis</i>," except that his entire essay is placed under the hermeneutic-phenomenological reduction of being to meaning and its constituting source in the disclosure of meaning to human understanding. But what lets meaning come about at all? What is the constituting source of meaning as such? The answer: <i style="">das Ereignis</i>, the ever-latent 'event' of the appropriation of the human being to the meaning-giving process. "Appropriation, the thrown-together-ness of man and meaning, is the origin of intelligibility as such. It is the ultimate <i style="">factum</i> . . . what Heidegger calls <i style="">facticity</i>" (p. 54), behind which, as Dilthey put it, thought can go no further. Hardly a brute fact, in view of its being charged with meaning, but it does constitute a limit to our understanding. "Everything is understandable except the reason why everything is understandable" (58). The groundless facticity of the ever-latent <i style="">Ereignis</i> in its meaning-giving is thus the ultimate mystery of our be-ing. </p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Charles Guignon's essay on "Heidegger's Concept of Freedom, 1927-1930" picks up some of these hermeneutic strands (91f.) insofar as freedom is the leeway of free play (<i style="">Spielraum</i>) granted by the meaningful context of a historical world that opens up a range of possibilities from which a Dasein chooses and, by way of binding commitment, strives to develop in an effort to fulfill its own unique meaning of be-ing, its <i style="">raison d'être</i>. This also highlights the two temporal dimensions of meaning, namely, pregiven context and direction taken, that Heidegger himself distinguishes in his now 'classic' -- but typically mistranslated -- statement of the meaning of meaning: "Meaning (<i style="">Sinn</i>) is the toward-which (<i style="">das Woraufhin</i>), [pre]structured by prepossession, preview, and preconception, of the project on the basis of which something becomes understandable <i style="">as</i> something" (SZ 151). </p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Iain Thomson's essay on "Ontotheology," which is the later Heidegger's comprehensive characterization of any metaphysics, examines the onto-theo-logical structure of the "epochal constellations of intelligibility," especially in the early Greek beginnings of metaphysics and at its end or completion in Nietzsche. Each metaphysical epoch grasps reality at once ontologically (what things are, viewed from the inside-out, fundamentally) and theologically (how things are, viewed from the outside-in, ultimately). The early Greeks began ontologically with water as the one element from which all else is composed (Thales) and theologically with Anaximander's <i style="">apeiron</i> (the indefinite, infinite) as the source of all finite things. Nietzsche's ontology resides in the will to power of all things and his theology in the eternal recurrence of the same. But the attempt to extend this Nietzschean ontotheology of eternally recurring will-to-power to our present epoch of global technology is not completely satisfying, since it does not adequately account for this phenomenon issuing from the modern epoch <i style="">in its entirety</i>. Heidegger characterizes this constellation of intelligibility with the single hyphenated word <i style="">Ge-Stell</i>, which is best translated etymologically from its Greek and Latin roots as "syn-thetic com-posit[ion]ing," which presciently portends the internetted World Wide Web with its virtual infinity of websites, Global Positioning Systems, interlocking air traffic control grids, worldwide weather mapping, etc., all of which are structured by the complex programming based on the computerized and ultimately simple Leibnizian binary-digital logic generating an infinite number of combinations of the posit (1) and non-posit (0). </p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">In a final essay included in this division, Simon Critchley explicates Heidegger's concept of ontological guilt as a debt or debit of existence rather than moral culpability, a lack or shortfall ever in need to be made up, of Dasein constantly lagging behind its possibilities, debit as an enduring way of be-ing. In sizing up its ultimately strange situation of be-ing, Dasein finds itself taut between two nothings, the nothing of being thrown into the world willy-nilly and the nothing of being projected into a life that inevitably ends in death. In the end, I owe it first to myself to own up to this double nullity inherent in human be-ing by becoming fully responsive to and responsible for this life that is most my own, ready to live it in its angst-full tension taut between the double shortfall of my birth and my ownmost death.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">II. <i style="">Interpreting Heidegger's Interpretations</i></p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Heidegger's interpretations of other thinkers and poets are notorious for their unorthodoxy and even violence. There are at least two reasons for this. First, in interpreting poets and other thinkers, Heidegger assumes that they partake at some level in the horizon of the originary hermeneutics of human life that is the starting point and goal of all of his interpretations. Second, his deconstructive interpretations of others' interpretations by and large tend to situate them within the history of the trend of interpretations of the Occidental tradition that he takes to be a <i style="">Seynsgeschichte</i>. Indeed, in the opening essay of this division, Dahlstrom illustrates how both of these dimensions come into play in Heidegger's interpretation of Heraclitus' conception of <i style="">phusis</i>. In an approach that was already announced early in <i style="">Sein und Zeit</i>,<sup><a style="" href="#_edn1" name="_ednref" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="">[1]</span></span></a></sup> Heidegger interprets Heraclitus' experience of <i style="">phusis</i> as ever-emerging self-concealment as a key to the meaning of be-ing at the beginning of Western thought. "<i style="">Phusis</i> is at once (diachronically) the emergence from hiddenness and (synchronically) the differentiation and interplay of unhiddenness and hiddenness" (144). Dahlstrom contends that Heidegger would be dismissive of the charge of anachronism, of projecting his own experience of be-ing back into the beginning of Western thought, of antedating some current event, since this presupposes a linear and so derivative conception of time, of a denumerable past that has passed away and is now long gone. Heidegger explicitly contends that his is a plausible interpretation of Heraclitus and that this sense of be-ing at the beginning of the history of Western thought, far from being past and gone, is the inception of an event so originary in its temporality that it continues to be ours as an originary past that comes to meet us from the future and allows us to think our way into another beginning (148f.). </p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Josh Michael Hayes examines how Heidegger existentializes the Aristotelian texts on the passions (<i style="">pathei</i>) of the soul in order to draw his own terms on how we find ourselves (<i style="">sich befinden</i>, i.e., <i style="">Befindlichkeit</i>) inescapably moved, affected, dis-posed, dis-placed by the world in moods that range from "being composed" (in tranquility, wonder, pleasure) to "being decomposed" (in fear, angst, pain), all of which define Heidegger's "pathology of truth." </p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Against the charge that Heidegger forced too much of his own thought onto Kant, Stephan Käufer demonstrates how "Heidegger's Interpretation of Kant" in his 'Kantbook' develops in tandem with the writing of <i style="">Being and Time</i>, which accordingly becomes a "deeply Kantian work." This is especially evident in the early chapters of Division II, where the phenomenology of Dasein as finitely situated ex-sistence merges with a transcendental argument about the temporal conditions of existence modeled after Kant's analysis (in the A-edition of the first <i style="">Critique</i>) of the threefold synthesis in the transcendental deduction. Heidegger thereby arrives at the originary temporality that defines the uniquely existing self, which is hardly the same as Kant's transcendental subject, which refers to <i style="">any</i> finite cognizer of objectively real representations. </p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Tracy Colony circumscribes an early phase in Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche where Nietzsche's thoughts stand in close proximity to his own task of thinking, before he eventually relegates Nietzsche to the reactive position of inverter of the entire tradition of metaphysics that marks its culmination and completion. The thoughts that Heidegger takes up as his own task are Nietzsche's witness to the death of God <i style="">and</i> to the need to prepare for the possibility of the recurrence of the divine, the need to create the conditions for a possible advent of new gods or, as it is put in the <i style="">Beiträge</i>, placing oneself at "the site of the passing of the last god."</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">The division concludes with Andrew Mitchell's "Heidegger's Poetics of Relationality," which examines Heidegger's postwar studies of the poetic speech of three poets in order to come to an understanding of the relation between being and language that such speech exposes. Rainer Maria Rilke's poetizing in the era of the completion of metaphysics, in particular Nietzsche's, whose language is therefore still contaminated with the logistics of the subject and object, provides a study in sharp contrast with the more poetic language of "song" that Rilke struggles to introduce. "Song does not represent something itself, it is that thing itself. Song is not a way of controlling the world, of manipulating it with tools (language). Instead, song is a way of receiving from the world . . . and letting things appear" (221). But metaphysics eventually wins out with Rilke's name for the field of relations, namely, "the Open," wherein things are understood to exist infinitely through poetic speech, i.e., to exist in full presence and in perfect belonging to the world (as represented by the figure of the Angel). </p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">What is lacking in Rilke is accordingly a sense of human finitude, a sense of not belonging perfectly in the world and of presabsence, which will be provided by Georg Trakl. Trakl's figure of the wanderer immediately conveys a sense of being ever unsettled as well as being ever exposed to the limits of finitude, which exposure is always an opening onto a beyond. The limit occurs as a site of contact and relation between what is one's own and what lies beyond, opening a space of tension between the within and the beyond in a finite world of relations ever underway. "The human, the things, and language are all set in motion and stripped of any pretension to presence. This being underway is the only belonging we know" (226). An ultimate sense of finitude comes from Stefan George's poem "The Word": "And so sadly I learned the renunciation: No thing may be where the word fails." This humbling experience makes the poet beholden to the power of the word, which "first bestows presence, i.e., be-ing, wherein something appears as a being" (227). It is the word that first lets things be, the word itself is the <i style="">wherein</i> of a thing's appearance: "the word 'would be' itself that which holds and bears the thing as thing, would be as this bearing: the relationship itself" (229), indeed "the relationship of all relationships;" "the word lets the thing be because the word provides the medium through which its differentiating articulation can appear" (230). Since they only appear in the medium of a language, things themselves are from the start relational and contextual. Moreover, all that appears in this medium does so meaningfully. "Meaning occurs through the connections and relations made possible by the medium of language" (230). With the hitherto implicit dimension of language/speech as milieu of meaning now explicitly in place, we have finally come full circle in our explication of the hermeneutics of factic life experience.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">III. <i style="">Interpreting Heidegger's Critics</i></p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Lee Braver provides a history of analytic philosophy's reactions to Heidegger beginning with the young Gilbert Ryle's relatively positive review of <i style="">Sein und Zeit</i> in <i style="">Mind</i> in 1929. The most curious feature of this review is that Ryle criticizes Heidegger especially on a point that he himself will make central in his classic 1949 book, <i style="">The Concept of Mind</i>. This book, much like <i style="">Being and Time</i>, begins with a parodying attack on the Cartesian model of the mind as "an inner space housing ghostly thoughts" in order to give precedence to the tacit knowledge of know-how occurring in intelligent practical interactions independent of the more theoretical know-that knowledge. Rudolf Carnap's 1931 article, "The Elimination of Metaphysics by Logical Analysis of Language," which logically dismantles "meaningless" words like the substantified "Nothing" and "pseudo-statements" like "The Nothing nothings," set the standard for decades to come for analytic philosophy's dismissal of Heidegger. Richard Rorty's efforts to promote fruitful interchange between analytic and continental philosophy, largely by devising demystified versions of Heidegger's strategy of explicating the historical backgrounds out of which the problem situations of each have developed in tandem and partial convergence, met with little success. More success in promoting this interchange is achieved by Hubert Dreyfus' critique of cognitivist artificial intelligence seeking to replicate human intelligence by way of computer programs based on formal systems of physical symbols ('1' and '0') interacting according to an overt 'known-that' set of syntactical rules. Such programs have proven to be limited and ultimately doomed to failure because human intelligence is in fact more a tacit and holistic know-how operating out of meaningful contexts and practical webs of purposes and interests that enable even a four-year-old to sort out the relevant factors necessary to interpret properly one or another problematic situation.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Wayne Froman's confrontation of Heidegger with Emmanuel Lévinas reveals distinct but complementary critiques of the entire history of Western metaphysics: for Heidegger, its identification of Being with permanent presence, for Lévinas, its reduction of otherness to sameness. But further comparisons only expose fundamental disagreements. Even the most solicitous interactions with others occur for Heidegger in the basic relatedness of being-with, which for Lévinas is a mere co-existence, a being alongside that completely misses the incomparable otherness of the Other in its elevation and destitution. For Heidegger, beings are encountered in a world, for Lévinas, subordinating my relation to an Other to world compromises this relation's ethical character. Insisting on the priority of world over beings means remaining in the context of sameness or I-ness, which Lévinas calls the paganism of the native, who revels in nature's elementals of the wind, sea, light, earth, sky and their mythical divinizations to the absolute exclusion of any alien Other.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Françoise Dastur's superb essay on "Derrida's Reading of Heidegger" takes up Derrida's multifaceted critique of Heidegger from various directions, including that of Lévinas. But the crux of the critique is that Heidegger's thought itself never fully overcomes the long tradition of the metaphysics of persistent presence that he himself identified and historically traces to its completion. The problem in the Heideggerian text is its inability to think through the ontological difference between be-ing and beings in a way that escapes equating be-ing with presence. Dastur makes the following points: Be-ing is <i style="">never immediately</i> present, never immediately appears but, as the most inapparent of phenomena, belongs to whatever does appear such as to constitute its meaning and ground (SZ 35). Be-ing is <i style="">never purely and fully</i> present because of its aletheic character of concealing that always happens <i style="">with</i> the clearing of beings. With concealment having the last word, the focus is now clearly on the difference, named by the later Heidegger as <i style="">Unter-schied</i> and <i style="">Enteignis</i> (expropriation), where be-ing itself is thought to come from the difference. But Derrida still retains the edge in the dispelling of presence. With his word "<i style="">différance</i>," he becomes the thinker of the absence of presence, of a presence indefinitely deferred in the play of infinite substitutions of the world-play, whereas Heidegger remains the thinker of the presence of absence, of unconcealment arising from a concealment ever in withdrawal.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">By and large, this is an excellent collection of masterly written essays all more or less tied to one of the most deeply seated threads coursing through all of Heidegger's thought, but, for that very reason, one that is quite often overlooked.</p> </div> <div style=""> <hr size="1" width="33%" align="left"> <div style="" id="edn"> <p class="MsoBodyText"><sup><a style="" href="#_ednref" name="_edn1" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="">[1]</span></span></a></sup> "We understand this task [of the history of be-ing] to be one in which, by taking <i style="">the question of be-ing as our guideline</i>, we <i style="">deconstruct</i> the traditional content of ancient ontology until we arrive at the original experiences in which the first and subsequently guiding determinations of be-ing were obtained" (SZ 22).</p> </div> </div> Richard Y Chappellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4523273001593653311.post-72604021941225611762011-07-27T22:40:00.000-07:002011-07-27T22:47:41.725-07:00NDPR Dean Moyar, Hegel's Conscience <p><font size="4">Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews</font></p> <p><font size="2">2011-07-36 : <a href="http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=24337">View this Review Online</a> : <a href="http://ndpr.nd.edu/">View Other NDPR Reviews</a></font></p> <p>Dean Moyar, <em>Hegel's Conscience</em>, Oxford University Press, 2011, 220pp., $74.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780195391992.</p> <p><font size="2"><strong>Reviewed by Peter Thielke, Pomona College</strong></font></p> <div id="hr"><hr /></div> <div class="Section1">Despite a growing interest in Hegel among Anglophone philosophers, there has been relatively little attention paid to the specific structure of Hegel's ethical views. Given this situation, it is gratifying to report not only that Dean Moyar's <i style="">Hegel's Conscience </i>seeks to fill this gap, but also that it does so in such an interesting and rewarding way. Far from being the paragon of impenetrability, Moyar's Hegel develops a theory of agency and ethical action that is both clear and cogent, as well as highly relevant to contemporary debates about these issues. The book is excellent and should be of interest not only to scholars of German Idealism but also to anyone seeking new options in currently ossified metaethical debates. It is not an exhaustive account of all aspects of Hegel's ethics, but it promises to lay the groundwork for what might well become a serious Hegelian alternative to more familiar models of moral agency. <p class="NDPRBodyTexT"> </font></p><p class="NDPRBodyTexT">The kernel of Moyar's argument concerns the central role of conscience in Hegel's ethics. At first glance, this might look like a rather unpromising place to start, since even Hegel himself castigates the ethics of conscience: if the moral worth of my actions is entirely dependent on whether I in good conscience perform them, then it seems that <i style="">anything</i> would be permitted, so long as I act with full conviction. As Moyar argues, however, such claims have misled commentators into thinking that Hegel is suspicious of all forms of conscience, when in fact his complaint is only with an ethics based on formal or abstract conscience alone. Rather, as Moyar claims, <i style="">actual</i> conscience for Hegel is the locus of practical reason; it "stands for a complex set of capacities that include judgment, inference, deliberation, belief, etc." (14). The agent of conscience acts on the subjective belief that her actions are right, but this is buttressed by the idea that objective reasons can be provided to support these beliefs. And, in one of the most interesting claims of the book, Moyar shows that, for Hegel, these reasons of conscience can only be understood in the context of a robust social practice -- Hegel's ethics is, in the end, based on a holistic account of inner and outer reasons that together form the complex web of individual agency <i style="">within</i> a larger society.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">The book is organized into six chapters, beginning with an account of self-consciousness and agency, moving through a discussion of motivating and justifying reason, ethical holism, deliberation and justification, and mutual recognition, before culminating in an interpretation of what Hegel means by Ethical Life. Moyar draws primarily from the <i style="">Phenomenology of Spirit</i> and the <i style="">Philosophy of Right</i> and is a careful and charitable reader; he is especially good at explicating Hegel's notoriously obscure texts and showing the consistent argument that runs through Hegel's discussions of ethical agency. He also does an excellent job of relating Hegel's views to contemporary positions, notably those of Richard Moran, Bernard Williams, Jonathan Dancy and Barbara Herman. This aspect of the book is most welcome, since it provides a clear path to the issues at the heart of Hegel's position while making them accessible to readers who might not be wholly at home in the <i style="">Phenomenology</i> or the <i style="">Philosophy of Right</i>.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Moyar's interpretation of Hegel is cast in terms of an ethical holism in which "an agent's motivating reasons stem from purposes that can be nested within broader purposes that provide the justifying reasons for the action" (74) -- what Moyar calls the 'Complex Reasons Identity Condition' (CRIC). The central idea -- one that is both novel and provocative -- is that an agent can behave ethically without needing always to act on the deliberate motive of duty, or even for the perceived general good. This might seem paradoxical, since the hallmark of ethical behavior is usually taken to depend on the subjective reasons or maxims that guide an action, and it is tempting to think that actions not directed by such an internal 'ought' would fail to live up to our ethical requirements. But as Moyar persuasively argues, Hegel rejects this view and has good reasons to do so. If morality rests on a set of absolute duties, or an abstract system of imperatives, Hegel claims, we can give no explanation of what would motivate an agent to act in such a way, unless she were already in possession of a particular internal motive to do so. Rather, by invoking Williams' notion of a standing purpose that reflects an agent's own interests, Moyar holds that for an ethical world to be rational, "it must be a system of objective purposes that are structured such that standing purposes of individuals can be nested within them" (76). This is essentially what Moyar takes Hegelian conscience to involve.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Such a view might threaten to devolve into a pernicious form of egoism, in which ethical duties are swallowed by self-interest, but Hegel's distinctive solution to this problem is one of the most interesting aspects of Moyar's project. What halts the slide into egoism is the nesting relationship between motives and justifications. Objective duties are not just side constraints on what bare egoism can pursue, but rather our self-interested reasons are at the same time justified by objective ethical structures manifested in social institutions: in Civil Society, "pursuing one's interest <i style="">is</i> one's duty" (70). This involves both a subjective and an objective element of agency. The latter is explicated by appeal to the notion of the transparency of self-consciousness in action, which Moyar draws from Moran: our motives are not simply brute psychological facts, but rather are reflections of those things for which we find good reasons. We act on beliefs about what we take to be our good because we rationally endorse them. These reasons, however, are not purely subjective, but are also informed by the objective moral facts and principles that govern social institutions, to which each particular motive must be answerable. In acting on my self-interest, I legitimately am also doing my duty, but only so long as my actions can also be justified in light of prevailing moral principles. According to CRIC, motives and justifications stand in a nested relationship, and actual conscience is just this complex activity of practical reason in acting according to CRIC.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">This is a subtle position, and perhaps an example drawn from Moyar will help make it clearer. In helping my daughter with her homework, say, my motives are directed at her individual needs, and arise from my concern about her well-being; in this subjective sense, I am acting only on my and her interests. But my interest is <i style="">also</i> guided and justified by larger social -- and objective -- considerations: parents have a duty to their children, and there are certain legal and social obligations that have institutionalized these moral demands. These need not be my proximate motives in helping her, but they are part of my complex set of reasons for action, and my action only makes sense, according to Hegel, when this set is treated as a holistic unity. For Hegel, objective justifications do not impose alien external constraints on my actions, but are rather included in the complex internal motives that direct my behavior. The holism here is crucial: I would not be an ethical agent were my motivations solely self-interested, with no recognition of the objective demands that society places on me; but neither would I be a complete agent were I always to require that my motives be general moral duties abstracted from my particular interests. Were I to help my daughter only because I was motivated by a duty towards human welfare in general, I would be guilty, as Moyar puts it, borrowing a phrase from Williams, of 'one thought too many.'</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Moral failure occurs when this holism is broken apart; taking a point from Dancy, Moyar argues that for Hegel we err when we detach one element from the complex whole and treat this as the only morally relevant feature of a situation. This detachment can take either a subjective or an objective form. In the former, I privilege abstract moral duties at the expense of particular interests or circumstances, in which case I open myself to the charge of hollow formalism, since I cannot specify how I should act in an actual situation without undermining the presumed priority of the abstract moral law. In the latter, I take my particular motives and interests as the only salient features of a moral situation and ignore the objective social element that provides external justification for my actions. In either case, the conditions on actual conscience that describe ethical agency are not met.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">This account of moral holism and conscience occupies roughly the first half of <i style="">Hegel's Conscience</i>; the latter part is largely devoted to spelling out what the content of morality involves. Moral demands arise within social contexts and reflect the various institutional and cultural expectations that guide our actions. By appealing to Herman's distinction between judgment and deliberation, Moyar argues that Hegel too sees moral agency not in terms of constantly testing maxims of action but rather in a settled disposition to act according to the various social roles one adopts. These roles in turn provide the contents of our moral activity, which are captured in "rules of moral salience" (115). In acting as a father, for instance, I do not constantly need to be deliberating about the moral basis for what I am doing; I simply act in the way proper for parents. Of course, my behavior can be challenged, in which case I am called upon to give a reason for my actions or to deliberate about what I ought to do. Given CRIC, however, these reasons and deliberations are not external to my moral concerns, but rather are part of the more complex account of agency that explains my actions. On Moyar's reading, Hegel's notorious account of freedom as simply living under the right social system is recast in a far more plausible light, which reveals that actual freedom is found in the alignment of universal conditions and particular internal motives. For the agent of conscience, there is no gap between the freely endorsed intention and the 'accomplished action'; because such an agent "takes all circumstances into account in deliberation, he foresees both the consequences of the action and how others will relate to it" (155).</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">This holistic account of agency also has some interesting implications for the types of institutional structures that provide the objective or external content to moral conscience. Here, Moyar argues, the key for Hegel is mutual recognition, either in directly engaging with another agent, which "is the norm in case of challenges to an agent's action," or more indirectly, in respecting others' purposes within the larger social context (145). And, in an especially well done discussion, Moyar shows how various aspects of the state, such as marriage, legal procedures, and institutions designed to ensure overall welfare, dialectically emerge from this account of conscience.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Such a brief summary unfortunately leaves out many important details of Moyar's rich and rewarding work. There are also some questions that remain about the force of Hegel's position, especially concerning the status of CRIC. Is CRIC intended to be a description of what our reasons actually involve, or rather a normative standard that we might often fail to meet? Either of these alternatives might look problematic: if CRIC is descriptive, then Hegel seems hard-pressed to account for cases in which our various motives and reasons cannot be reconciled, such as when I violate the speed limit to save time, or do too much of my daughter's homework for her. Here I have reasons that I take to be compelling, but it's not clear that my rational justification is also one that will "aim at universality" (147). If cases like this are fairly frequent (and it seems like they are), then the conditions of ethical agency that CRIC lays out are not often satisfied, and the ground of Hegel's concrete Ethical Life could be called into question. This suggests that CRIC should instead be treated normatively, as a goal for ethical agency, but such a view might run afoul of Hegel's intention of finding "a 'totality' in which the ought is overcome" (140). Indeed, unless I have antecedent dispositions to try to meet the conditions of CRIC, it seems that Hegel's own criticisms of Kant and other 'moralists' would apply equally well to the normative reading of the principle. In any case, given its crucial role in Moyar's argument, the status of CRIC could be made clearer.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">More broadly, Moyar sees Hegel as attempting to complete the Kantian system (11), but the emphasis on CRIC might instead be seen as moving Hegel further away from Kant. For Kant, creatures like us will always confront a tension in our practical agency, between the demands of the moral law and our inclination toward self-interest. Despite the wonder that the 'moral law within' inspires in Kant, he nonetheless holds that we are always tempted to let our particular advantage supersede the moral law. So long as our motive is our duty, then Kant would likely agree with CRIC, but his worries are that our motives frequently are <i style="">not</i> drawn from duty; this is what predisposes us to immorality. Hegel, however, seems -- at least on Moyar's account -- to have a far more optimistic view of humanity than does Kant; for Hegel, the possibility of reconciling our particular interest and our moral duty is a hallmark of Ethical Life, and he is critical of Kant for seeing morality and self-interest as often opposed to each other. But if Hegel's solution in fact rests on a reconception of human nature, it's not clear that he is solving Kant's problems, instead of just offering a competing vision of the human condition.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Finally, one of the great strengths of <i style="">Hegel's Conscience</i> is Moyar's ability to demystify Hegel's jargon and to connect his concerns to contemporary views in ethics. But this strategy also raises some questions about the force of Moyar's interpretation. These concerns are not directed at the general method of juxtaposing historical and contemporary issues -- in the Introduction, Moyar does an excellent job of defending the value of such an approach -- but rather with the specific details of how Hegel's overall view can be squared with the various contemporary accounts Moyar introduces. Moyar draws from parts of a number of contemporary views, but says little about whether they all -- Dancy's particularism, Williams' critique of the 'morality system,' Herman's Kantianism, and so on -- can be held together in a consistent system. The worry is that Moyar cherry picks features of positions whose foundations stand opposed to Hegel's broader views. Despite a shared holistic view of the ethical enterprise, for instance, it's not clear that Dancy's and Williams' broader accounts can be squared with Hegel's more rationalistic and systematic general position.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">This is less a criticism than a call for further elaboration, for if indeed Hegel's ethical position were capable of reconciling all of these various positions, or -- perhaps better -- of combining attractive elements of each into a consistent whole, this would make the already strong position Moyar develops on Hegel's behalf even more interesting as a new contender in metaethical debates. As it stands, <i style="">Hegel's Conscience</i> provides both an admirably clear and accessible interpretation of Hegel's texts and a novel and provocative account of agency, one that will, in concert with other work emerging from the renewed interest in Hegel, likely form the basis for a distinctively Hegelian metaethical position.</p> </div> Richard Y Chappellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4523273001593653311.post-90341221189666040672011-07-27T22:39:00.000-07:002011-07-27T22:42:58.936-07:00NDPR Charlton Payne, Lucas Thorpe (eds.), Kant and the Concept of Community <p><font size="4">Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews</font></p> <p><font size="2">2011-07-35 : <a href="http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=24336">View this Review Online</a> : <a href="http://ndpr.nd.edu/">View Other NDPR Reviews</a></font></p> <p>Charlton Payne and Lucas Thorpe (eds.), <em>Kant and the Concept of Community</em>, University of Rochester Press, 2011, 321pp., $34.95 (pbk), ISBN 9781580463874.</p> <p><font size="2"><strong>Reviewed by Justin Shaddock, Dominican University</strong></font></p> <div id="hr"><hr /></div> <div class="Section1"><i>Kant and the Concept of Community</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> brings a necessary unity to the manifold of Kant studies. The courses we take as students and teach as professors, as well as the papers and books we read and write, often cover only a single area of Kant's philosophy. A few collections do treat all of Kant's works, yet the essays in even these collections often stand in isolation. This would be unfortunate in any field, but since Kant is such a systematic philosopher, we should expect especially revealing connections here.<sup><a style="" name="_ednref1" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="">[1]</span></span></a></sup> </span><i>Kant and the Concept of Community</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> brings together some of today's most eminent Kant scholars to argue for the thesis that Kant's many conceptions of community in his theoretical, practical, aesthetic, religious, and political philosophy are all "modeled on the concept of community found in the table of categories and judgments." (2) In this review, I will assess this thesis by briefly examining the volume's thirteen essays. I will suggest in closing that there is another dimension of Kant's philosophy that ought to be unified. It is not across the various areas of his thought, but across the disparate doctrines he endorses over time.</span> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT"> </font></p><p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Béatrice Longuenesse contributes an essay on Kant's derivation of the category of community from the disjunctive form of judgment in the first <i>Critique</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. By the disjunctive form of judgment, she explains, "one </span><i>divides</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> a concept, say </span><i>a</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, into mutually exclusive specifications of this concept, say </span><i>b, c, d, e</i><span style="font-style: normal;">," and "consider[s] the assertion of any one of the specifications (</span><i>b, c, d, or</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> e) of the divided concept </span><i>a</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, as a sufficient condition for negating the others, and conversely consider[s] the negation of all but one as a sufficient condition for asserting the remaining one." (21) Kant then derives the category of community, according to Longuenesse, by reasoning that </span></p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">just as in a disjunctive judgment, the sphere of a concept . . .<span style=""> </span>is divided into its subordinate spheres, so that these subordinate spheres are in a relation of mutual determination while at the same time excluding one another, so in a material whole, things mutually determine one another, or even in one material thing or body considered as a whole, the parts are in a relation of mutual attraction and repulsion. (24-25) </p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Kant's argument in the Third Analogy is that since our representations are always successive, our cognition of simultaneity presupposes our application of the category of community, and the upshot for Longuenesse is that "objects are . . . individuated in space and time <i>by their reciprocal interaction</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, and </span><i>concepts</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> of objects thus individuated are concepts of relational properties." (31)</span></p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Many of these points are repeated and extended in Eric Watkins's essay on Kant's theoretical philosophy. He explains that the disjunctive form of judgment divides a logical space into mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive spheres, that the category of community reciprocally coordinates substances and their states, that the schematized category of community "states that if two (empirically knowable) substances stand in mutual interaction, then their states (or determinations) must be <i>simultaneous</i><span style="font-style: normal;">," (47) and that the Third Analogy specifies that this "mutual interaction must be understood in terms of substances </span><i>jointly </i><span style="font-style: normal;">determining their states in such a way that the causal activity of the one depends on that of the other (and vice versa)." (52) Watkins then explains how the concept of community features in the </span><i>Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, in Kant's theory of how matter fills space by exerting reciprocal repulsive forces and in his theory of the equality of action and reaction.</span></p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Lucas Thorpe promises to connect Kant's theoretical and practical philosophy, but his essay fails to fulfill this promise. Thorpe explains that Kant rejects his predecessors' theories of physical influx, occasionalism, and pre-established harmony, since none can account for the real interaction among essentially active substances. Kant's own theory, on Thorpe's interpretation, is that the substances in a community must be governed by laws legislated by those substances themselves and so "must be autonomous." (80) But one wonders how this can be right. Thorpe's interpretation would seem to contradict the first <i>Critique's </i><span style="font-style: normal;">doctrine</span><i> </i><span style="font-style: normal;">that the objects of our possible experience necessarily stand under the category of community, and in so doing it would also seem to negate any connection between the first and second </span><i>Critiques</i><span style="font-style: normal;">.</span></p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Paul Guyer focuses on Kant's conceptions of community in his practical philosophy. He argues that the realm of ends is "the goal of our moral choice of maxims . . . enjoining us to treat all rational beings with whom we may interact as ends in themselves and to seek a systematic union of the particular ends freely chosen by all such rational beings," that the moral world is "the realization of the goal of the realm of ends," and that the highest good is "the condition that would result from the realization of the moral world . . . under ideal conditions, in which . . . the virtue of all would make all happy." (117-118) Guyer also traces a development in Kant's thinking. He argues that in the first <i>Critique</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> Kant incoherently postulates God's creation of nature as a condition of the possibility of the highest good in the afterlife, and that he equally incoherently postulates God's creation of nature in the second </span><i>Critique</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> in order to make our moral perfection in the afterlife possible. Guyer argues that Kant finally reaches a coherent view in his writings of the 1790's (including the third </span><i>Critique</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, "On the Common Saying: 'That May Be Correct in Theory, but It Is of No Use in Practice,'" and </span><i>Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason</i><span style="font-style: normal;">), where he postulates God "as the condition of the possibility of the existence of the 'ethical community,' which is an earthly condition of cooperation that facilitates the development of . . . virtue" (108)</span></p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Allen Wood aims to elucidate Kant's definition of religion, given in his <i>Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, as the subjective attitude toward our moral duties as commanded by God. Wood argues that for Kant radical evil is our propensity to prefer the satisfaction of our empirical desires to duty, and since its source is our social tendency to value ourselves over others, we can overcome it only by "adopting ends that . . . agree (or even coincide) with the ends of other human beings, and that they do so by directly fulfilling the idea of a 'realm' in which all ends form . . . a mutually supporting system." (130) On Wood's account, Kant defines religiousness as subjectively regarding our duties as God's commands, because such a mutually supporting system would constitute an ethical community, and its laws would have to be regarded by its members as God's legislation. One wonders, however, whether Guyer's and Wood's accounts of the </span><i>Religion </i><span style="font-style: normal;">are compatible. While for Guyer Kant maintains that we must postulate God as an objective condition of the possibility of the existence of the ethical community, for Wood Kant holds only that we members of the ethical community must subjectively regard our duties as legislated by God.</span></p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">The topic of Onora O'Neill's essay is Kant's distinction between public and private reason in "What is Enlightenment?" and "What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?" She explains that private reason derives its authority from some source other than reason (for example, a country's legal code, a religion's official teaching, or an economy's organizing principles), and so carries conviction only for those who also already acknowledge that other source. Public reason alone confers fundamental justifications, she explains, because it is governed by laws that hold for all in virtue of reason's self-legislation. O'Neill concludes that </p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">the form of independence that counts for Kantian autonomy is not the independence of the individual 'legislator' but rather the independence of the principle 'legislated' from whatever desires, decisions, powers, or conventions may be current among one or another group. (147)</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">But here one wonders whether it is not equally important to emphasize the point that individual legislators must be independent of their particular practical identities (for example, as an American, a Christian, or a Capitalist), as it is to stress the point O'Neill rightly makes that legislated principles must be independent of the commitments of the group or groups to which they belong.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Jeffrey Edwards writes on Kant's theory of property in the <i>Metaphysics of Morals</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. Edwards sets out two </span><i>prima facie</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> problems. The first is how "the achievement of empirical possession through first possession-taking" can be "consistent with the categorical prescriptions of right involved in the concept of universal will." (156) Kant's answer, on Edwards's account, is that "the original possession of an external object can </span><i>only </i><span style="font-style: normal;">be possession in common." (157) But this leads Edwards to a second problem, "why should acquisition through unilateral occupation receive the favor of any law of right if it represents the type of control-seizing act that can generate a condition of universal conflict by virtue of the dynamical community of all possessive agents?" (167) Edwards's answer attributes to Kant a "principle of </span><i>equality</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> in distribution," according to which, "we may place upon all others an obligation to refrain from using certain objects . . . </span><i>only insofar </i><span style="font-style: normal;">as this does not bind all others, in their use of objects, to refrain from </span><i>more</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> than we are reciprocally bound by all of them to refrain from using." (174) Edwards admits that this is not a principle Kant himself articulates, but he maintains that it is required by a charitable interpretation.</span></p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Michael Feola considers whether Kant's practical philosophy can be defended against the Hegelian criticism that it is overly individualistic. On Feola's interpretation, Kant is not crudely individualistic, but recognizes the ethical community's role in overcoming our social tendency to evil. Yet, for Feola, Kant nevertheless posits a unidirectional dependence of the ethical community on reason, and it is this unidirectionality that Hegel criticizes. On Feola's interpretation, "Kant posits a unilinear relationship of influence from<i> a priori</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> principles to the social world," (195) and Hegel counters that </span></p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">our normative bonds do not follow from imposing an <i>a priori</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> principle upon a recalcitrant or wayward social domain. Rather, we are born into a world that already makes rational claims upon us through the traditions and practices that articulate the meaningful ends of human life, as particularized within this community (196). </span></p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">While Feola offers a very clear picture of this Hegelian criticism, he goes further and endorses it, but unfortunately without any more than a sketch of an argument.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Another criticism of Kant's practical philosophy is raised in Ronald Beiner's essay. Beiner points out a tension between Kant's moral egalitarianism and his theory of citizenship. On one hand, Kant's moral egalitarianism is the view that all human subjects deserve equal respect on account of our free rational nature. Kant's view of citizenship, on the other hand, distinguishes between active and passive citizens. "Passive citizens," Beiner explains, "include women, children, and those who are economically dependent on a 'master." (211-212) The tension arises, according to Beiner, since for Kant citizenship is a moral category, in that "the state acknowledges our <i>freedom </i><span style="font-style: normal;">as human beings and grants us </span><i>equality </i><span style="font-style: normal;">as subjects" (219), and yet "independence, rather than being an </span><i>entailment</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> of citizenship as a properly moral status, instead becomes the </span><i>condition</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> of an experience of full citizenship that is available to some but not available to others." (218) There is no doubt that Beiner is correct in identifying this tension, but Kant's prejudice, while reprehensible, is hardly news.</span></p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Susan Shell challenges theorists who maintain that the European Union attains Kantian political ideals. She argues that for Kant rights and duties go hand in hand: "Citizenship implies not only a willingness to pay taxes or affective feelings of belonging but also, first and foremost, a reciprocal right and duty of mutual defense." (237) She argues, however, that "the European Union constitutional draft has much to say about the 'rights' of citizens, but little to say about their 'duties." (236) Shell's conclusion is that "if Europe cannot be a federal nation-state (along U.S. lines), it would be better off as a federation of nation-states along genuinely Kantian lines." (239)</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">The final three essays by Charlton Payne, Jane Kneller, and Jan Mieszkowski treat Kant's notion of the "sensus communis," but none connects the conceptions of community in Kant's first or second <i>Critiques</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> to this notion in his third. Payne assesses the extent to which the model of a "sensus communis" can be employed to understand political action, Kneller considers whether this model can be employed to understand judgments about communities other than our own, and Mieszkowski argues that it provides a model for a superior alternative to Habermas's communicative action theory. These are all interesting essays in their own right, but since none supports the volume's thesis that Kant employs one concept of community in the many areas of his thought, I will not consider them in more detail here.</span></p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Let me instead suggest that this volume might have traced the development of Kant's thinking about community across the various views he held over time. To be sure, Guyer traces a development in Kant's practical philosophy, and Thorpe lays out the options of Kant's predecessors in theoretical philosophy, including the theories of physical influx, occasionalism, and pre-established harmony. But in Kant's own 1770 <i>Inaugural Dissertation</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, he espouses a thesis that he calls "generally established harmony," with which he aims to combine elements of pre-established harmony and physical influx.<sup><a style="" name="_ednref2" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="">[2]</span></span></a></sup></span><i> </i><span style="font-style: normal;">Kant later rejects pre-established harmony in two important texts. First, in a 1772 letter to Marcus Herz, he rejects it for inviting the dogmatic stipulation that any and all of our non-empirically derived concepts might apply to objects.<sup><a style="" name="_ednref3" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="">[3]</span></span></a></sup> Then in the 1787 B-edition of the </span><i>Critique of Pure Reason</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, he rejects pre-established harmony again, but now for granting the skeptical wish that the categories might apply to objects just because of the </span><i>a priori </i><span style="font-style: normal;">constitution of our subjectivity.<sup><a style="" name="_ednref4" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="">[4]</span></span></a></sup></span></p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT"><span style=""> </span>In light of this, we should not interpret Kant's mature idealism as the thesis that the objects of our possible experience have a categorial structure just because of their dependence upon our subjectivity's <i>a priori</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> constitution. Kant would regard such an idealism as tantamount to skepticism. Of course, Kant does not espouse the transcendental realist conception of objectivity and subjectivity as wholly independent either. We should rather interpret his idealism as positing an interdependence, or reciprocity, between the objects of our possible experience and our finite cognitive subjectivity. Moreover, once this interpretation of Kantian idealism is in place, we should also give more weight to an interpretation of Kantian autonomy not as representing individuals as legislating the moral law into authority, but rather as involving a similar reciprocity between our finite agential subjectivity and the moral law's authority.</span></p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Of course, this impugns no particular essay in this collection, nor its overall thesis. It is surely revealing to examine the systematic interconnections in Kant's thought, and this collection provides a worthwhile study of Kant's concept of community. I have argued that it might have been even more illuminating, however, had it also examined the historical development of Kant's thinking about community in his theoretical philosophy. Understanding Kant's own reasons for rejecting his early views should give us insight into his mature positions.</p> </div> <div style=""> <hr align="left" width="33%" style=""> <div style="" id="edn1"> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT"><sup><a style="" name="_edn1" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="">[1]</span></span></a></sup> The single-authored work that gives the best treatment of this problem, to my mind, is Karl Ameriks's <i>Interpreting Kant's Critiques</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).</span></p> </div> <div style="" id="edn2"> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT"><sup><a style="" name="_edn2" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="">[2]</span></span></a></sup> Immanuel Kant, <i>On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intelligible World</i><span style="font-style: normal;">,</span><i> </i><span style="font-style: normal;">in </span><i>Theoretical Philosophy 1755-1770</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, trans. David Walford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 2: 409.</span></p> </div> <div style="" id="edn3"> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT"><sup><a style="" name="_edn3" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="">[3]</span></span></a></sup> Immanuel Kant, "Letter to Marcus Herz, February 21, 1772," in <i>Correspondence</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, trans. Arnulf Zweig (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 10:131.</span></p> </div> <div style="" id="edn4"> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT"><sup><a style="" name="_edn4" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="">[4]</span></span></a></sup> Immanuel Kant, <i>Critique of Pure Reason</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), B167-168.</span></p> </div> </div> Richard Y Chappellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4523273001593653311.post-6809815401989782042011-07-26T19:15:00.001-07:002011-07-26T19:26:08.938-07:00NDPR Ken Gemes, Simon May (eds.), Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy <p><font size="4">Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews</font></p> <p><font size="2">2011-07-34 : <a href="http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=24334">View this Review Online</a> : <a href="http://ndpr.nd.edu/">View Other NDPR Reviews</a></font></p> <p>Ken Gemes and Simon May (eds.), <em>Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy</em>, Oxford University Press, 2009, 272pp., $85.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780199231560. <br /> <br /></p> <p><font size="2"><strong>Reviewed by Bernard Reginster, Brown University</strong></font></p> <div id="hr"><hr /></div> <div class="Section1"> <p class="NDPR1JournalTitle">Nietzsche's views on freedom and autonomy are confined to short, provocative statements dispersed throughout his writings. For this reason, they have not been the object of much focused, systematic scholarly treatment. This collection of essays by some of the finest Nietzsche scholars, edited by Ken Gemes and Simon May (whose helpful introduction also outlines its contents), is a spirited attempt to fill that scholarly gap. The contributions collected in <i>Nietzsche on Freedom and Autonomy</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> can be divided into two groups, each focusing on one basic aspect of the question of freedom and autonomy. The first concerns the nature of the self to which freedom and autonomy are attributed: contributions that concentrate on this question tend to treat freedom as a </span><i>defining</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> </span><i>feature of selfhood</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, or agency. The second question bears on what it is for that self to be, or to achieve, freedom and autonomy: contributions that consider this question tend to treat freedom as an </span><i>ethical ideal</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> to be pursued by individuals who already are selves or agents. More than half of the contributions (those by Sebastian Gardner, Ken Gemes, Christopher Janaway, Brian Leiter, Aaron Ridley, David Owen, and Maudemarie Clark and David Dudrick) are primarily devoted to the Nietzschean conception of the self, specifically of the self understood as </span><i>will </i>or agency. And almost all of the remaining contributions (those by Robert Pippin, Simon May, John Richardson, and Peter Poellner) examine Nietzsche's conception(s) of freedom and autonomy as an ethical ideal. I will review each group of essays in turn, and, for ease of presentation, not necessarily in the order in which they appear in the collection.</font></p><span style="font-style: normal;"></span> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT"> </p><p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Gardner's opening essay exposes a fundamental tension in Nietzsche's views of the self. Nietzsche's <i>theoretical</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> approach to the self is </span><i>eliminativist</i><span style="font-style: normal;">: the self is a </span><i>fiction</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. This theoretical fictionalist view of the self stands in conflict with the conception of the self that seems presupposed by his </span><i>practical</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> philosophy. Nietzsche's practical philosophy rests on a "view of valuation as reflexive affirmation" (10), by which Gardner means two things: </span></p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">First, the subject who values must understand himself -- his self -- as the <i>ground</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> of the value that he affirms. . . . Second, there is a reciprocal relation in Nietzsche between valuing, self-creation, and self-affirmation: to determine such and such to be of value is to determine </span><i>oneself</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> and to affirm oneself by way of affirming what one values, and vice versa. (9)</span></p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">This appears to be a version of the Kantian view that the source of (practical) normativity is to be found in the agent: the normative authority of a value for an agent lies in the fact that he "created" it, from which it follows that an agent cannot value anything without also valuing <i>his self</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> as the source of this valuation. And such a reflective self-valuation is not possible without a robust, non-fictionalist conception of the self. Gardner also alludes to another Kantian idea, namely, the primacy of the practical point of view, and points out that Nietzsche's theoretical treatment of the self cannot adequately account for this point of view:</span></p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">there is in Nietzsche's theoretical treatment of the I no trace of a philosophical account of the self that is in the appropriate way <i>internal,</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> that expresses how the self is </span><i>for itself. </i><span style="font-style: normal;">. . . Nietzsche's theoretical picture of the self by contrast is consistently </span><i>external,</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> and can be entertained only for as long as the self is viewed from the outside, whence its discrepancy with the (necessarily internal) practical point of view. (11)</span></p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">This characterization of the issue might suggest that Nietzsche simply failed to recognize that the more implicit commitments of his practical philosophy conflict with his explicit theory of the self. But Gardner and his fellow contributors take pains to show that this is not the case. Gardner himself argues that this fundamental conflict is not so much inconsistency as self-conscious aporia, in which he takes us to be led by strong naturalistic commitments in theory, on the one hand, and the inescapably practical demands of "life" (particularly, the demand for "meaning" discussed in <i>Genealogy</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> III, 28), on the other. Gardner concludes that, for Nietzsche, this aporia points to "the potential independence of the purposes of life from philosophical representations" (29), an idea merely suggested here but explored in later essays, in particular that by Poellner.</span></p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Other contributors to this question agree with Gardner's characterization of the fundamental tension in Nietzsche's views, but take him to <i>resolve</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> it, more or less explicitly, in one way or another. Thus, Janaway argues that a practical view of the self must be presupposed in Nietzsche's at least implicit conception of the very knowledge that produces his theoretical (naturalistic) view of the self as a hierarchy of (presumably impersonal) drives. Nietzsche appears committed to holding that knowing must be an activity of the drives, because the self is composed of drives and there is nothing else to do the knowing. However, Janaway maintains, if the self is nothing over and above a hierarchy of drives, then the representations they afford cannot amount to </span><i>knowledge: </i></p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">his aims of improving our capacity for knowing and skillfully using our affects demand more of a self than that: he needs his inquirer to be an active and sufficiently unified self that can represent its subject-matter truly, that rides on top of the inner multiplicity, and that can self-consciously adopt attitudes towards it. (60) </p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Janaway proceeds to suggest that just as Nietzsche cannot coherently wish to get rid of the idea of a unified self, over and above its drives, he cannot wish to get rid of <i>some</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> idea of free agency either, although presumably one that differs from the "neutral subject of free will," which he repudiates (66).</span></p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Leiter also acknowledges the tension, but proposes to characterize it as a discrepancy between our <i>experience </i><span style="font-style: normal;">of willing (as an autonomous cause of action) and what willing </span><i>really</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> is, namely, a fiction. In his interpretation, Nietzsche maintains that willing exists only in the sense that we can have an experience</span><i> </i><span style="font-style: normal;">of willing -- specifically of our decisions causing actions -- but this experience is entirely epiphenomenal. Willing does not cause action, which is in reality the effect of basic psycho-physiological facts about us, which also cause us to have the experience of "willing." Leiter notes that this view anticipates recent findings in neuroscience, which may be put forth as retroactive support for Nietzsche's position.</span></p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">This approach raises one basic question: what explains the existence of the experience of willing if it is a fiction that plays no causal role in the production of action? Leiter suggests that this experience is a contrivance of the will to power, the desire to feel "superior." In his view, a person has an experience of willing when he identifies with a "commandeering thought," which he takes to govern certain bodily feelings, and this identification produces "the meta-feeling of superiority, which is the feeling of willing proper": "In short, one experiences willing when one <i>feels</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> as if the bodily qualia are obeying the thought, and that the commanding thought is who I am." (110) One problem with this proposal is that it conflates willing with </span><i>successful </i><span style="font-style: normal;">willing. But it seems as though I can have an experience of willing even when my body fails to respond, and I precisely do not feel "as if the bodily qualia are obeying the thought." When I will to move my paralyzed body, for example, I have an experience of willing, which means that I identify with a "commandeering thought" even though it does not elicit obedience. But then this identification cannot be motivated by the "feeling of power" that is supposed to explain its occurrence, a fact Nietzsche himself appears to acknowledge (e.g., </span><i>Daybreak</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> 109).</span></p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">By way of a close reading of <i>Beyond Good and Evil</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> 19, in which Nietzsche offers one of his most explicit analyses of the will, Clark and Dudrick develop a subtle critique of Leiter's naturalistic interpretation and argue that, naturalistic appearances notwithstanding, Nietzsche in fact advocates a robustly </span><i>normative</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> conception of the will as an ordering of drives, in which some have the </span><i>authority</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> to command others. When the normative ordering of a person's drives is reflected in their </span><i>causal</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> ordering, that is, when the strongest drives are also the drives with the authority to command, or those that express the person's </span><i>values</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> -- when, in Nietzsche's words, the person's drives constitute a "well-constructed and happy commonwealth" -- then the person's will can be said to </span><i>cause</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> her actions.</span></p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Clark and Dudrick acknowledge that Nietzsche strongly objects to traditional conceptions of the will as the cause of action, but they do not take him to repudiate the notion altogether. He only denies that the will is a <i>sufficient</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> cause of action, but they observe that we customarily speak of something causing something else even when its power to cause depends on the obtaining of certain conditions. </span></p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">The further conditions to be met if willing is to bring about action are therefore whatever conditions must be in play for the commands of the superior drives to bring about the obedience of the commanded drives. The main condition would presumably be that the commanded drives recognize the authority of the commanding drives, that the commanded and commanding drives thus exist in a 'well-constructed and happy commonwealth'. (262)</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">In their view, then, Nietzsche only objects to the thought that the will is a sufficient cause of action, which could "affect the causal order of one's drives -- hence what one does -- simply by issuing commands." </p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">Ignoring that fact that willpower only brings about action if the commanded drives are willing to obey, allows one to ignore all of the moral luck -- the influence of 'the world, ancestors, chance, and society' -- that goes into having one's drives exist as a 'well-constructed and happy commonwealth' -- and thus to believe that one has total causal responsibility for one's actions. (263) </p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Whether or not the will, understood as a faculty framed by the agent's values, can cause action is a matter of luck, but in such lucky circumstances, it has genuine causal power.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Gemes agrees with Leiter that Nietzsche rejects a certain notion of free will, which he calls "deserts free will," which is the free will presupposed by the judgment that someone <i>deserves</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> punishment or reward for an action. But he also points out that Nietzsche endorses a notion of free will (particularly in his discussion of the "sovereign individual"), which he calls "agency free will," because it is a condition of "genuine agency." Crucial to Gemes' account is the idea that genuine agency is not an innate property of individuals, but an </span><i>achievement</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, and a fairly unusual one at that: </span></p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">Nietzsche offers what might be called a naturalist-aestheticist account: to have a genuine self is to have an enduring coordinated hierarchy of drives. Most humans fail to have such a hierarchy: hence they are not sovereign individuals. Rather they are a jumble of drives with no coherent order. Hence, they are not genuine individuals, or, we might say, selves. (46)</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Apparently, this account is "naturalistic" in that it denies "the notion of an I separate from the drives" (48). This very denial, however, threatens its coherence. Gemes offers the following "helpful picture": </p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">According to Nietzsche most humans, being merely members of the herd, are merely passive conduits for various disparate forces already existing and operating around them. Some individuals, due perhaps to conscious design but more likely due to fortuitous circumstances, actively collect, order and intensify some of these disparate forces and create a new direction for them, thereby, in fortuitous circumstances, reorienting, to some degree, the whole field of forces in which they all exist. It is these individuals according to Nietzsche who deserve the honorific person, who by imposing their strong will exercise a form of free will and genuine agency. (42)</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">This picture invites two distinct interpretations. On the one hand, we might take individuals to "exercise a form of free will and genuine agency" when they "actively" order, by "conscious design," the forces at work within themselves. But this suggests that free will and genuine agency are <i>presupposed</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> by such ordering, rather than the </span><i>product </i><span style="font-style: normal;">of it, so that there must be "an I separate from the drives." On the other hand, we might take free will and genuine agency to be the product of an ordering of the drives that is "due to fortuitous circumstances." Those individuals in whom "anarchy" reigns, with many drives struggling with each other for the control of their mind and body, would lack free will and genuine agency insofar as they would be unable to govern their lives in accordance with their commitments (as Nietzsche puts it, they would lack "the right to make promises"). Nietzsche calls these individuals "slavish" to reflect the fact that they have no self-control and are enslaved to their variable drives, for which they are "merely passive conduits." We might wonder, however, whether the difference made in the sovereign individual by the fortuitous organization of his drives suffices to account for the emergence in him of "genuine agency." Is the "sovereign" individual so described any less a "merely passive conduit" for forces operating within him (his drives) than the "slavish" individual? Does the fact that the former's drives are organized, while the latter's are not, alter in any way that fundamental passivity? It is therefore unclear how, on this account, Nietzsche would resolve the tension brought out in Gardner's opening essay.</span></p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Ridley follows Gemes in taking the freedom associated with the "sovereign individual" to represent a defining condition of agency. The sovereign individual is the individual who has "the right to make promises" (or commitments), and therefore has <i>standing </i><span style="font-style: normal;">as an agent. In Nietzsche's view, to have the right to make promises, one must be prepared to "stand security" for one's own future. Precisely what this amounts to requires clarification, according to Ridley, for it would be implausible to suppose either that the sovereign individual has complete control over his future circumstances, or that, recognizing the limits of his control, he limits himself to making promises he knows he will be able to keep, other things remaining equal. In Ridley's view, the distinction of the sovereign individual is that he is prepared to see through his commitments, even if other things do not remain equal -- "to indemnify the promise against the </span><i>ceteris paribus</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> clause altogether, so that the intention is executed </span><i>regardless.</i><span style="font-style: normal;">" (186) Yet, the issue cannot simply be one of "fidelity to his commitments in seeing them through no matter what", for there will be circumstances in which he cannot see through his commitments in any natural way; the issue is that he will then find an </span><i>alternative</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> way of seeing them through. Ridley's subtle proposal is that this is possible for promises the characteristic </span><i>content</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> of which "is an intention whose success-conditions are internal to the execution -- that cannot, that is, be non-trivially specified in advance and independently of some particular way of meeting them." (190) This proposal is not without problems. For one thing, it is not evident why the sovereign individual would confine himself to promises with that characteristic content. For another, even when the content of his promising is an intention whose success conditions are internal to the execution, the sovereign individual might find himself in circumstances in which the promise cannot be indemnified. For instance, I can promise to write you a stirring sonata but find myself unable to do so </span><i>in any way </i><span style="font-style: normal;">by a complete lack of musical ability.</span></p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Like Ridley, Owen also takes the concept of the "sovereign individual" to articulate Nietzsche's view of full-blooded agency and attributes an "expressive view of agency" to Nietzsche, that is to say, the view that the agent's intentions are not simply revealed, but actually <i>constituted</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, by the actions that execute them (215). Unlike Ridley, however, he takes the sovereign individual's ability to "stand security" for his future not to be the ability to find </span><i>some</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> way to fulfill his promise, regardless of circumstances, but rather to consist of "an acknowledgment of one's responsibility as extending to those occasions on which the commitment cannot or must not be honoured in the form of an acknowledgment of the moral remainders that result from one's justified inability to keep one's word." (207)</span></p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">In contrast to the above-mentioned contributors, May devotes the bulk of his contribution to an exploration of Nietzschean freedom as an ethical ideal. His chief claim has two parts. First, he takes the Nietzschean ideal of freedom to be a kind of <i>experience:</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> to be free is to experience or see oneself in a certain way. Second, to achieve freedom consists essentially in overcoming self-contempt, and this means overcoming the "will to nothingness" that breeds it: "Until man has overcome this self-contempt he has not overcome the legacy of the will to nothingness. As a result he cannot be truly free." (103) Nietzschean freedom, in other words, is </span><i>self-affirmation</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. The intuitive plausibility of this view of freedom becomes somewhat muddled, however, when May curiously relates it to the ability to make, and govern oneself in accordance with, commitments (or freedom as a condition of agency). This is perplexing since it makes overcoming self-contempt a condition of the possibility of agency. Self-contempt could no doubt significantly interfere with the making and keeping of commitments, but it is far from clear that it would undermine it altogether.</span></p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Richardson also focuses on the character of Nietzschean freedom understood as an ethical ideal that goes beyond the achievement of agency. He begins by conceding that Nietzsche operates with distinct conceptions of freedom. First, he "makes being-a-self and being-free consist in a certain unity or unification of drives" (133): in this case, freedom is a matter of having one's drives harmoniously unified, which results in a state and feeling of absence of constraint, the opposite of which "is the state and feeling of being hemmed and constrained, prevented from venting and discharging" (133). Second, freedom is also "agency" for Nietzsche, which Richardson defines as the capacity to deliberate and make choices, which presumably requires the ability to <i>stand back</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> </span><i>from</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, and </span><i>go</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> </span><i>against,</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> the drives (137). In Richardson's view, each of these kinds of freedom has a particular history. The first is a legacy of our animal past, whereas the second, "agency," develops in response to the demands of social life. It follows that the standards by the light of which the individual deliberates about his drives are originally </span><i>social</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> standards: "Agency's principal function (what social processes have mainly designed it for) is to ensure that members do what they must for the society to hang together and prosper." (142) Our conscious and deliberating self secretly expresses interests and values that might be contrary to those of our natural self (the drives). We are thereby induced to reflect on the nature and origin of those interests and values (this is the task of genealogy) and align them with those of our natural self. This points to a new kind of freedom, different from the first two: "So I learn to remake myself in a way never possible before, a self with a new kind of responsibility for itself." (147) Richardson's interpretation is elegant and plausible, even if it says little about the grounds for Nietzsche's optimism about the actual prospects for realizing this new kind of freedom.</span></p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Like Richardson, Pippin begins by noting a tension in Nietzsche's conception of freedom. Unlike Richardson, he argues that this tension is not to be resolved into a higher kind of freedom, but is definitive of the very character of freedom. In Nietzsche's view, freedom involves a capacity to sustain a wholehearted commitment to an ideal, on the one hand, and, on the other, a capacity in tension with such a wholehearted commitment, a willingness to overcome or abandon such a commitment in altered circumstances or as a result of some development. To remain stuck to an ideal, to become unable to commit oneself wholeheartedly, or to slide into complacent, lazy identification with what is conventionally valued, are all forms of unfreedom for Nietzsche. In Pippin's view, the issue here </p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">seems to be the proper acknowledgement and endurance of the self-overcoming character of life, . . . underlying it appears to be a much broader theory about the historical fragility of all human norms, the inevitability not just of a kind of organic growth and death, but of a self-overcoming process . . . . It is this historical fate for norms that <i>requires</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> the kind of acknowledgment and endurance that Nietzsche praises when he discusses self-overcoming. (80-1) </span></p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Pippin recognizes that the achieved state of mind Nietzsche proposes is not easy to make out, but the chief merit of his insightful contribution is to show that this difficulty might be unavoidable, a function of the very character of freedom. He also emphasizes that this state of mind cannot be achieved by a simple exercise of willpower: "The conditions for the attainment of freedom -- the proper relation of attachment and detachment -- seem largely prevoluntary and extend in scope beyond what individuals can do." (83)</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Poellner's intriguing exploration of Nietzsche's ideal of freedom of spirit brings together the two main conceptual strands of the collection, namely freedom understood as a condition of the possibility of agency and freedom understood as an ethical ideal. He first notes that agency requires the ability to distinguish between values and "mere" desires. Nietzsche's own view of value, however, threatens to undermine this distinction. Since "our most fundamental acquaintance with values is through affective states," where an affect is "any state with a distinctive phenomenology of favoring or disfavoring, of attraction or 'repulsion'," it is hard to see how to account for the <i>objectivity</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> of the content of value judgment, understood as "the notion of a </span><i>constraint</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> upon impulses which makes these intelligible to the subject herself and to others as </span><i>preferences.</i><span style="font-style: normal;">" (158) Poellner proposes to resolve this problem with the idea of </span><i>phenomenal objectivity</i><span style="font-style: normal;">: </span></p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">What is characteristic of the emotions we are inclined to describe as love, admiration, or contempt, is that they are normally experienced not merely as <i>caused</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> by their objects, but as </span><i>merited</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> by them. . . . In other words, the affective response is itself experienced as an </span><i>appropriate </i><span style="font-style: normal;">response to some feature of the object, as a picking up on some value-aspect pertaining to the object. . . . Affective experience itself does not commit us to any view about whether or not what is presented in it has the right metaphysical credentials. But, Nietzsche suggests, it </span><i>does</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> commit us to ascribing at least </span><i>phenomenal objectivity</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> to those features which it appears to the subject to be a registering of. (162)</span></p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">It might appear to the agent as if some of her affects are "picking up on some value-aspect pertaining to the object." But should she not worry about the "metaphysical credentials" of this appearance? Poellner suggests that the curbing of the will to truth, which Nietzsche presents as a condition of freedom of spirit, is at bottom the claim that if there is a theoretical conflict between practice and a certain kind of metaphysical truth, we should affirm the former over the latter, provided that we have strong independent reasons to value the practice (173). We have such reasons to value the practice of agency -- of seeing "reason" or "meaning" in life, for example: it is "life-enhancing" for individuals with our constitution, and therefore we could not do without it. The kind of metaphysical truth Nietzsche takes his free spirit to disregard is what Poellner calls a "purely theoretical truth," that is to say, a truth with no practical significance whatsoever. Some theoretical truths are not "purely theoretical" if they have practical significance, for example by underwriting empirical predictions. Even purely theoretical truths can matter practically, however, to an individual who has interests such that his well-being can be affected by knowledge or belief about an empirically inaccessible truth ("autonomously belief-dependent interests"). For instance, the purely theoretical claim "that being is at the fundamental level in principle non-representable" might engender a sense of deep alienation. In Poellner's view, Nietzsche's free spirit would have no such interests, and would therefore be indifferent to purely theoretical truths when they conflict with his practical commitments (177). This is an intriguing proposal, but it is not without problems. For instance, it is far from evident that Nietzsche intends his critique of the will to truth to be limited to "purely theoretical truths": this critique appears to concern the <i>manner </i><span style="font-style: normal;">in which truth is valued and pursued rather than the </span><i>kind</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> of truth so valued and pursued. And it is not clear that it is possible, indeed, even desirable, to get rid of all significant "autonomously belief-dependent interests": for instance, is the individual who is in no way affected by the realization that being is fundamentally unknowable really worth emulating?</span></p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Mathias Risse's paper is an outlier in this collection, insofar as it does not touch upon the ideas of freedom and autonomy. Its topic is the compatibility of Nietzsche's doctrine of the eternal recurrence with his naturalism. Risse resorts to the somewhat convoluted strategy of beginning by noting the affinity between Nietzsche's naturalism and Freud's and then asking whether <i>Freud</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> would be prepared to affirm the recurrence of his life, on his naturalistic understanding of it. Risse argues that neither Freud nor Nietzsche would be able to do so on two main grounds. First, the naturalistic account of the mind implies that self-knowledge is difficult, if not impossible; and it is hard to see how one could wish for the eternal recurrence of something one cannot know well. Second, the naturalistic account of the mind suggests that certain attitudes presumably incompatible with wishing the eternal recurrence of one's life, such as guilt and </span><i>ressentiment</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, are unavoidable. Risse grants that neither the difficulty of self-knowledge, nor the inevitability of </span><i>ressentiment</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> makes wishing the eternal recurrence </span><i>impossible</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, but he finds various proposals to overcome those difficulties inadequate.</span></p> </div> Richard Y Chappellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4523273001593653311.post-4950744088853683142011-07-26T19:15:00.000-07:002011-07-26T19:21:05.317-07:00NDPR Michael J. Shaffer, Michael L. Veber (eds.), What Place for the A Priori? <p><font size="4">Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews</font></p> <p><font size="2">2011-07-33 : <a href="http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=24335">View this Review Online</a> : <a href="http://ndpr.nd.edu/">View Other NDPR Reviews</a></font></p> <p>Michael J. Shaffer and Michael L. Veber (eds.), <em>What Place for the A Priori?</em>, Open Court, 2011, 261pp., $44.95 (pbk), ISBN 9780812696608.</p> <p><font size="2"><strong>Reviewed by Elijah Chudnoff, University of Miami</strong></font></p> <div id="hr"><hr /></div> <div class="Section1">This volume collects twelve new papers that take up questions about the existence, nature, and scope of <i>a priori</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> knowledge. In general, the papers are narrowly focused entries in standing debates from the contemporary literature. Those looking for introductory or historical discussion should look elsewhere.</span> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT"> </font></p><p class="NDPRBodyTexT">The papers collected approach the <i>a priori</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> from a number of different starting-points, for example: psychotherapy, philosophical methodology, naturalism, the conditions for scientific inquiry, and content externalism. Even so, the volume's contents cluster, for the most part, around three dominant concerns: indispensability arguments, the constitutive </span><i>a priori</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, and Casullo's program.</span></p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Indispensability arguments go like this:</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">Premise 1: We have knowledge about matters such as mathematics, morality, and metaphysics.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">Premise 2: We couldn't acquire this knowledge by empirical reasoning, i.e., reasoning based on sensory perception.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">Conclusion: So we acquire it by <i>a priori</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> reasoning, i.e., reasoning not based on sensory perception.</span></p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">The first two papers – Michael Devitt's "No Place for the A Priori" and Edward Erwin's "Evidence-Based Psychotherapy" -- agree on premise 1. Devitt cites familiar examples; Erwin argues that psychotherapy depends on value judgments. Devitt rejects premise 2. He defends the Quinean view that empirical support can accrue to beliefs about mathematics, etc. holistically, via their incorporation in a web of beliefs that "faces the tribunal of experience as a corporate body." Erwin criticizes this response to premise 2. He points out that a weaker premise suffices for the argument:</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">Premise 2*: We do not in fact acquire this knowledge by empirical reasoning.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">The question now is whether Quinean observations about how our beliefs are actually confirmed undermine premise 2*. Erwin argues that they do not. He disentangles moderate theses -- e.g., beliefs are confirmed in clusters -- from stronger theses -- e.g., all of our beliefs form a seamless web. The moderate theses are plausible, but do not threaten premise 2*. The stronger theses threaten premise 2*, but, Erwin argues, are not plausible.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Two other papers touch on indispensability arguments. In "The Philosophical Insignificance of A Priori Knowledge," David Papineau concedes that <i>a priori</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> knowledge is possible, but assumes that "if there is any a priori knowledge, it is analytic" (p. 61), and develops a conception of philosophical inquiry on which it is a form of empirical reasoning, not </span><i>a priori</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> reasoning. He briefly considers mathematical and moral claims. He takes both sorts of claims to be neither analytic nor justified on the basis of empirical reasoning. This suggests to me that there is synthetic </span><i>a priori</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> knowledge. Papineau does not explore this possibility, however, and limits his focus to philosophical methodology. In "A Dilemma for Naturalized Epistemology?" Shane Oakley focuses on epistemic principles. It is important to distinguish two ways in which these might bear on the existence of </span><i>a priori</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> knowledge, which I'll call the formal way and the substantive way.</span></p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">The formal way: the <i>a priorist</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> might argue that empirical reasoning cannot be the only kind of reasoning since then we couldn't non-circularly justify the epistemic principles that govern empirical reasoning itself.</span></p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Oakley rightly points out that if this is a good argument it applies to <i>a priori</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> reasoning as well. Devitt also makes this point in his paper, and notes that in both cases the circularity need only be rule-circularity.</span></p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">The substantive way: the <i>a priorist</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> might argue that </span><i>a priori</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> reasoning puts us in a position to give a rule-circular justification for the epistemic principles that govern it, but that empirical reasoning does not put us in a position to do even this much.</span></p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Whatever reason there is to believe premise 2 in the indispensability argument would likely be a reason to believe this claim as well, since epistemic principles seem more akin to the claims of mathematics, etc. than to empirical claims.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">A number of papers in the volume argue -- largely by reflection on scientific methodology -- that we must rely on certain beliefs that are not straightforwardly supported by empirical reasoning but that do not answer to traditional conceptions of the <i>a priori</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. For example, in "Epistemological Empiricism" Harold Brown argues that no belief is immune to empirical challenge but that "coherent scientific research requires something that plays the normative role of synthetic a priori propositions" (p. 151). In "A Reconsideration of the Status of Newton's Laws," David Stump argues that our scientific theories are "grounded empirically but still contain functionally a priori elements that cannot be directly tested and without which the theor[ies] could not be stated." (p. 187) And in "A Priori Conjectural Knowledge in Physics," Nicholas Maxwell argues that "we have a priori knowledge in the sense of </span><i>conjectural</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> knowledge accepted on grounds other than evidence, but not in the sense of </span><i>indubitable</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> knowledge established by reason alone." (p. 215, italics in original)</span></p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">The beliefs Brown, Stump, and Maxwell focus on are sometimes called constitutively <i>a priori</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> (see p. 193). They are constitutive in that our allegiance to them forms the framework within which empirical reasoning proceeds. They are </span><i>a priori</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> in that they are presupposed by empirical reasoning, not justified by empirical reasoning. They are different from traditional items of </span><i>a priori</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> knowledge primarily in that they are not justified by an alternative, non-empirical form of reasoning.</span></p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Does the constitutive <i>a priori</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> provide an alternative to the two standard views -- the </span><i>a priorist</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> view that some knowledge is based on </span><i>a priori</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> reasoning and the empiricist view that all knowledge is based on empirical reasoning? In "The Constitutive A Priori and Epistemic Justification," Michael Shaffer persuasively argues that it does not. The proponent of the constitutive </span><i>a priori</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> faces a dilemma. Either constitutively </span><i>a priori</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> beliefs are the sorts of mental states that are epistemically justified or unjustified, or they are not, being mere conventions. If they are mere conventions, then their existence is compatible with empiricism, since empiricism is a claim about knowledge, which consists of mental states that are epistemically justified. Suppose they are epistemically justified or unjustified. Then either this justification derives from sensory perception or it does not. If it does, then constitutively </span><i>a priori</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> beliefs are, however different their function from other empirical beliefs might be, based on empirical reasoning, and so, again, empiricism is safe. If their justification does not derive from sensory perception, then constitutively </span><i>a priori</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> beliefs are based on </span><i>a priori</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> reasoning, and so </span><i>a priorism</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> is true. The upshot is that the category of constitutively </span><i>a priori</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> beliefs might be useful for developing a view of the nature of scientific inquiry, but it does not significantly alter the debate over the existence of </span><i>a priori</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> knowledge. It should be noted, however, that many of the proponents of the constitutive </span><i>a priori</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> are more concerned with developing a view of the nature of scientific inquiry -- especially one that is empiricist but that departs from Quinean holism (see Stump on p. 188, for example) -- than addressing the debate between </span><i>a priorists</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> and empiricists.</span></p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">The volume includes two papers -- by Anthony Brueckner and Robin Jeshion -- that discuss Casullo's book <i>A Priori Justification</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, along with Casullo's reply to them. According to Casullo, </span><i>a priori</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> justification is justification that does not derive from experience, "nonexperiential justification." What is experience? Casullo distinguishes between a broad and a narrow usage of "experience":</span></p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">Broad: any mental state with a phenomenal character is an experience</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">Narrow: sensory perceptions are experiences, and intuitions are not, even if both have phenomenal characters</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">One of his main theses is that "experience" in its narrow usage is a natural kind term, and therefore the nature of experience so understood is to be revealed by empirical investigation, not armchair analysis.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Jeshion focuses on this aspect of Casullo's project. She argues that "experience" is not a natural kind term. As Casullo points out, her argument depends on the assumption that if "experience" is a natural kind term, it is a term for a physical or biological kind. Casullo's view, however, is that it is a term for a psychological kind, which might be realized in physically and biologically different ways. Jeshion suggests that "experience" is a functional kind term. Casullo interprets her proposal as follows:</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT" style="margin-left: 0.5in;">X is an experiential process if and only if X is a cognitive process by which we secure information about the world via causal relations to objects in the world accessed through distinctive conscious phenomenological states (p. 131).</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">I find his criticisms of this particular proposal persuasive. My overall impression of the debate, however, is that there is room to accommodate elements from both positions -- experience can be a functional kind and also be associated with an underlying nature that can only be revealed by empirical investigation.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Consider David Marr's distinction between three levels at which we might understand an information-processing task: computational, algorithmic, and implementation. Mirroring these levels we might say that experiences serve a certain function, that certain psychological processes carry out this function in humans and creatures with a similar psychology, and that these psychological processes are realized in a particular way in human brains and creatures with a similar biology. What is the function? It seems to me to be one that Casullo considers and rejects: experiences, narrowly understood, serve to make us aware of contingently existing objects, states, and events. One virtue of this proposal is that it groups sensory perceptions, episodes of introspection, and bodily sensations together as experiences, which is proper since none of these are <i>a priori </i><span style="font-style: normal;">sources of justification. If we ignored the functional level and focused on the psychological level, however, it is unlikely that we would find a kind that groups sensory perceptions, episodes of introspection, and bodily sensations together. Casullo rejects this proposal because (i) it rules out the possibility of immediate experiential justification for beliefs about abstract objects or immediate </span><i>a priori</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> justification for beliefs about contingently existing objects, and (ii) it fails to explain how the justification for beliefs about abstract objects differs from the justification for beliefs about concrete objects.<sup><a name="_ednref1" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[1]</span></a></sup> But (i) is not an obvious consequence -- some bridge from claims about awareness to claims about immediate justification is required -- and, given that it is about </span><i>immediate</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> justification and not justification in general, seems plausible anyway, and (ii) seems to me to impose an explanatory burden on views about the nature of experience that they need not bear.</span></p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Another of Casullo's main theses is that determining whether we have any <i>a priori </i><span style="font-style: normal;">knowledge also depends on empirical investigation. Suppose intuitions are the putative sources of nonexperiential justification. Casullo's idea is to assess the epistemic credentials of intuition by investigating the psychological processes that are involved in it. If it turns out that they reliably cause true beliefs about their target domain, say mathematics, then </span><i>a priorists</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> will be vindicated. Brueckner and Casullo take up various concerns about the enterprise. One concern is that even if it takes empirical investigation to determine the reliability of the psychological processes involved in intuition, there are various epistemic questions about intuition that might best be pursued from the armchair. As Brueckner points out, for example, there are questions about epistemic relevance of reliability, and hence of the envisioned empirical inquiry, that do not themselves seem answerable by empirical inquiry.</span></p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">In "Terror of Knowing," Ümit Yalçin discusses a cluster of issues familiar from the literature on content externalism and self-knowledge. Consider the following argument:</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-indent: -0.25in;">1.<span style="font: 7pt "";"> </span>Oscar knows without epistemically depending on his senses that he is thinking that water is wet.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-indent: -0.25in;">2.<span style="font: 7pt "";"> </span>Oscar can know without epistemically depending on his senses that his thinking that water is wet entails that there is water in his environment.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT" style="margin-left: 0.5in; text-indent: -0.25in;">3.<span style="font: 7pt "";"> </span>Therefore, Oscar can know without epistemically depending on his senses that there is water in his environment.</p> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT">Should we be troubled by this argument? Maybe not. One traditional empiricist project is to prove the existence of the external world on the basis of premises about your own mental states. If you're an empiricist of this sort, then, Yalçin suggests, you should embrace (3). Two observations. First, most traditional empiricists thought that we must epistemically rely on sensory <i>experiences</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> to establish claims about the external world. Second, most traditional empiricists endorsed a phenomenalist view of the external world. Yalçin does not discuss how these additional aspects of traditional empiricism bear on the acceptability of (3).</span></p> </div> <div> <hr align="left" width="33%" style=""> <div id="edn1"> <p class="NDPRBodyTexT"><sup><a name="_edn1" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[1]</span></a></sup> See Albert Casullo, <i>A Priori Justification</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, Oxford University Press (2003), p. 152.</span></p> </div> </div> Richard Y Chappellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.com