Philosophy

In the following paper, I analyse and contrast the thoughts of Kierkegaard and Heidegger concerning the problem of existence. I undertake the analysis by first examining how these two thinkers distinguish themselves from the metaphysical tradition. As finite and temporal entities, Kierkegaard’s self and Heidegger’s Dasein mark a radicalisation over the notion of subjectivity in the metaphysical tradition. This gives philosophy a new way to acknowledge the limits of our finite existence instead of merely engaging in a purely conceptual and theoretical analysis. However, I conclude that Kierkegaard is still partly confined to the metaphysical conception when he fails to distinguish the existentiell aspect of the self from the existential aspect. I contend that Heidegger’s Dasein is a further radicalisation over Kierkegaard’s self in that the former is uniquely characterised by the openness of its way of Being.

The aim of this essay consists in elucidating the manner in which Gadamer’s reflections on language relate and contribute to the notion of place, which is here to be understood in terms of Heimat and Fremde. While Gadamer’s engagement with the question of place may not be evident at first glance, especially when one is largely concerned with his major work Truth and Method (1960), it is nevertheless possible to identify in and through his later works the respect in which he took up and engaged with the question, most notably through the contemplation of language. By bringing out the relation between language and place, I hope to indicate the way in which Gadamer advances a thought that is at once nuanced and radical.

This essay advances an interpretation of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics that is worked out in light of the works of two contemporary German philosophers, Bernhard Waldenfels and Peter Sloterdijk. By bringing Gadamer in dialogue with these two thinkers, I aim to present the dimension of non-difference that characterises his hermeneutic thinking. To this end, Gadamer’s views on the mother tongue (Muttersprache) and the home (Heimat) will be explored by examining the phenomena of foreignness and birth, each of which was developed by Waldenfels and Sloterdijk respectively. In the first part of the essay, I offer a reading of Gadamer that shows how Waldenfels’ critique of Gadamer based on radical foreignness is unfounded and misguided. I then proceed to make the case that the mother tongue must be thought in terms of the coming-to-language (Zur-Sprache-Kommen), the notion of which is employed by both Gadamer and Sloterdijk. As a notion that marks our original belonging to the world, I contend that the coming-to-­language needs to be understood outside of the logic of difference. This essay thus concludes with the reflection that hermeneutics is essentially bound up with the character of non-difference, which is to be distinguished from the thinking of difference that dominates contemporary discourse.

"Contents:

- Lasting themes in American philosophy from Charles Sanders Peirce
- William James, John Dewey, and other classical American pragmatists
- Varieties of realism, naturalism, and positivism from 1900 to 1950:
The New Realism
Critical Realism
The revolution in logic and the conceptual pragmatism of C. I. Lewis
Logical Positivism
- Mid-century developments: from positivism to ordinary-language
philosophy
- One case study in philosophical continuity and change across two
generations [i.e., father & son: Roy Wood Sellars and Wilfrid Sellars]
- Analytic philosophy in the naturalistic American style comes of age
- Neo-pragmatism and other recent developments"

During the first half of the 20th century analytic philosophers tended to argue that while Kant had indeed raised important questions concerning the nature of our knowledge, subsequent developments in logic, mathematics, natural science and philosophy entailed either the partial or complete rejection of Kant’s transcendental philosophy. Later, however, there was a strong revitalization of interest in Kant’s ‘transcendental’ approach to epistemological issues. This article presents a non-technical overview of these developments by focusing on a representative sampling of certain key conceptual episodes in that history and relating them to four central themes from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

This article examines the relationship in Kant between transcendental laws and empirical laws (focusing on causal laws), and then brings a particular interpretation of that issue to bear on familiar puzzles concerning the status of the regulative maxims of reason and reflective judgment. It is argued that the ‘indeterminate objective validity’ possessed by the regulative maxims derives ultimately from strictly constitutive demands of understanding.

Each of the standard outlooks in the philosophy of perception--phenomenalism, direct realism, indirect realism, scepticism--has been viewed as Hume's own considered position in the eyes of different informed commentators. I argue that Hume does not belong univocally to any one of the traditional stances in the philosophy of perception, nor does he leave us with only a schizophrenic or 'mood' scepticism. Hume attempted to resolve the traditional philosophical problem (or perhaps more accurately, to set it aside on principled grounds) by transforming the issue from one of an unachievable global theoretical consistency to one of pragmatic coherence. Hume's moderate scepticism and his systematic naturalism entail a reflective 'return' to the vulgar (cp. T 223), a qualified normative endorsement of the directly realist beliefs of common life. The interpretive challenge is to understand the subtle nature of that endorsement, and to explain how it arises out of genuinely Humean doctrines.

In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant argues for a 'Principle of the Permanence of Substance' (A182, the 'First Analogy of Experience'). Put in the most general terms, Kant offers a transcendental argument for the conclusion that all the changing appearances we encounter in experience must be conceived as the alterations of absolutely permanent, forever abiding substance. It is widely acknowledged that it is difficult to find an actual argument for this thesis in the text. The source of the difficulty, however, lies at least as much in unclarity as to what exactly Kant is trying to prove as to how he goes about proving it. Consequently for the bulk of this paper I will be less concerned with the structure and validity of Kant's argument than with the correct interpretation of his unique conception of substance and material reality in general. I will then argue that correcting certain basic misconceptions concerning the nature of Kantian material substance serves to put his argument for absolute permanence in proper perspective.

In recent decades an increasing number of philosophers influenced by Wilfrid Sellars have stressed the importance of a distinction between the normatively structured ‘logical space of reasons’ on the one hand, and the proper domain of naturalistic causal explanations characteristic of modern natural science on the other. What I explore in this paper is the difficult question of the nature of the relationship between the natural and the normative as it was conceived by Sellars himself. I shall argue that Sellars’ own view represented an attempt to defend both the irreducibility of the normative space of reasons and yet, simultaneously and in another sense, its comprehensive reducibility from the perspective of an ideal scientific conception of the nature of reality and of the human being.

Hume's famous account of our idea of the identity through time of persons and objects is based upon a principle of individuation according to which the idea of numerical sameness properly applies only to unchanging objects. Hume derives this idea of identity from a „fiction of the imagination‟ concerning the possibility of time without change. I argue that the puzzle Hume raises concerning identity and change is an important one in the form that he raised it, and not misguided as some have suggested; however, I show that his recourse to the duration fiction in attempting to account for our ascriptions of identity lands him in a vicious circularity. In the course of these arguments I take a close look at the nature of Humean fictions. In the final section I then suggest that there are resources in the Treatise for a more successful Humean account of the idea or „fiction‟ of identity, based primarily on certain aspects of Hume‟s theory of abstract ideas.

William James held that the “difference between monism and pluralism is perhaps the most pregnant of all the differences in philosophy” (WB 5),1 and he himself came down firmly on the side of a thoroughgoing philosophical (epistemological, metaphysical, and value) pluralism. James was one of the first thinkers to articulate a comprehensive philosophical vision incorporating what we would now find it natural to call a conceptual scheme pluralism. In doing so he introduced conceptions that have since become the mother-tongue of our philosophical thought. In this essay I propose to examine the nature and sources of James’s wide-ranging pluralism by focusing in particular on the account he offers of the role of concepts within perceptual experience. What view of the nature of concepts separated James from his monistic philosophical opponents and underpinned his own attempts to defend a general philosophical pluralism? In addition to its intrinsic historical interest as a prime mover in the development of pluralist conceptions throughout the 20th century, the case of James will also serve to underscore the fact that some of the most difficult and important issues raised by the concept of pluralism have their sources in the seemingly more arcane question of how exactly it is that concepts enable us to grasp any truths at all.

The contention in this paper is that central to Sellars’ famous attempt to fuse the ‘manifest image’ and the ‘scientific image’ of the human being in the world was an attempt to marry a particularly strong form of scientific naturalism with various modified Kantian a priori principles about the unity of the self and the structure of human knowledge. The modified Kantian aspects of Sellars’ view have been emphasized by current ‘left wing’ Sellarsians, while the scientific naturalist aspects have been championed by ‘right wing’ Sellarsians, the latter including William Rottschaefer’s constructive criticisms of my own reconciling interpretation of Sellars. In this paper I focus first on how (1)Sellars’ Kantian conception of the necessary a priori unity of the thinking self does not conflict with his ideal scientific naturalist conception of persons as ‘bundles’ or pluralities of scientifically postulated processes. This then prepares the way for a more comprehensive discussion of how (2) Sellars’ modified Kantian account of the substantive a priori principles that make possible any conceptualized knowledge of a world does not conflict with his simultaneous demand for an ideal scientific explanation and evolutionary account of those same conceptual capacities. Sellars’ own attempted via media synthesis – what I call his ‘Kantian scientific naturalism’ – merits another look from both the left and the right.

Abstract:  Recent proponents of the ‘theory theory’ of mind often trace its roots back to Wilfrid Sellars’ famous ‘myth of Jones’ in his 1956 article, ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’.    Sellars developed an account of the intersubjective basis of our knowledge of the inner mental states of both self and others, an account which included the claim that such knowledge is in some sense theoretical knowledge.  This paper examines the nature of this claim in Sellars’ original account and its relationship to more recent debates concerning ‘theory of mind’, in particular the theory theory.  A close look reveals that Sellars’ original view embodied several distinctions that would enable more recent theory theorists to accommodate certain phenomenological objections that have been raised against that outlook. At the heart of the philosophical issue is an overlooked complexity involved in Sellars’ account of the ‘theory/observation’ distinction, involving a conception of the distinction that is both independently plausible and a key to the issue in dispute.

In this article I consider how the very different but equally Sellars-inspired views of Robert Brandom and Ruth Millikan serve to highlight both the deep difficulties and the prospects for a solution to what is arguably the most central problem raised by Sellars's attempted stereoscopic fusion of the manifest' and scientific images: namely, the question of the nature and place of norm-governed conceptual thinking within the natural world. I distinguish two stereoscopic tasks: (1) the possibility of integrating a naturalistic theory of animal representation within an irreducibly normative inferentialist account of conceptual content; and (2) the possibility of providing a naturalistic explanation of the normative space of reasons and conceptual thinking as such. Millikan embraces and Brandom resists the naturalistic representationalist hypotheses involved in (1); while Brandom embraces and Millikan resists the conception of pragmatically irreducible normativity involved in (2). The grounds of resistance in each case are arguably suspect.

This article explores Kant’s analysis of the concept of teleological ‘purposiveness’, with comparisons both to Aristotle’s metaphysics of substance and Daniel Dennett’s neo-Darwinian account.  There is a sense in which both Kant and Dennett aim to preserve analogues of Aristotle’s conception of the final causality that is essential to biological explanation, but within their radically transformed post-Newtonian and post-Darwinian philosophical contexts.  Of particular interest are the structural similarities, despite their wide differences, between Kant’s and Dennett’s conceptions of the status of teleological judgments.  For both of these thinkers, Newtonian and (for Dennett) Darwinian concepts of the physical-causal mechanism of nature have a certain objective epistemic priority over our concepts of the intrinsic teleological purposiveness or natural ‘design’ exhibited by biological beings.  Nonetheless, for both thinkers as for Aristotle, teleological principles are argued to be explanatorily indispensable for us.  The central question investigated here concerns the subtly varying differences in epistemic status that result from the different philosophical perspectives that inform each of these accounts of teleological principles.