John McDowell

Along with what J. McDowell has called the disjunctive conception of experience (DCE), and against a venerable tradition, the veridical experience that P and the subjectively indistinguishable hallucination that P are not type-identical mental states. According to McDowell, a powerful motivation for DCE is that it makes available the sole internalistically acceptable way out of a sceptical argument targeting the possibility of perceptual knowledge. In this paper I state in explicit terms the sceptical argument McDowell worries about, and show that DCE has not the epistemological merits that McDowell ascribes to it. To begin with, I join a series of commentators in arguing that the way out of the sceptical argument made available by DCE is not internalistically acceptable, and so argue that it is not a way out that an internalist about epistemic justification would have any special reason to prefer to a parallel externalist way out that does not commit to DCE. Secondly, I show that the internalist can resist the sceptical argument by denying a different premise of it that McDowell takes for granted. I conclude by maintaining that McDowell's epistemological motivation for DCE is undercut.

Auf die Frage »Was ist Wahrnehmung und welche Rolle spielt sie für die Objektivität der Erfahrung?« hätte Ernst Cassirer vermutlich schlicht geantwortet: »Wahrnehmung ist eine erste Form objektiver Erfahrung.« Damit stünden wir bereits mitten im Zentrum von Cassirers Hauptwerk. Tobias Endres macht es sich in dieser Studie zur Aufgabe, Cassirers Philosophie der symbolischen Formen einer Neu- und Gesamtinterpretation zu unterziehen und sie als eine Phänomenologie der Wahrnehmung auszulegen. In Auseinandersetzung mit klassischen und gegenwärtigen Wahrnehmungstheorien wie der Sinnesdatentheorie, dem Disjunktivismus oder dem Enaktivismus gelingt es dem Autor, die Aktualität und Originalität solch einer phänomenologischen Wahrnehmungstheorie aufzuzeigen. Im Fokus stehen dabei einerseits bekannte, jedoch bislang nicht hinreichend bestimmte Topoi wie die Ausdruckswahrnehmung oder die Invariantentheorie, darüber hinaus aber auch die in der Forschung bislang ungekannte Kennzeichnung der Wahrnehmungsfunktion durch den Begriff der Elastizität, die Theorie der »Sinnenkreise« sowie die Charakterisierung der »Voll-Wahrnehmung« als Offenbarung eines holistischen Lebenszusammenhangs aus Cassirers Nachlasstexten. Am Schluss dieser Neuaneignung des Hauptwerks steht der Nachweis, dass der Zusammenhang von Wahrnehmung und Objektivität das zentrale Thema ist, das sich durch alle Schaffensphasen Cassirers hindurchzieht.

This article (in German) discusses the scope and content of John McDowell's famous claim that human perception is "conceptual all the way out". I motivate the claim by explaining its role within McDowell's transcendental concern to account for the mind's "openness to the world", i. e. the immediate presence or givenness (no capital "G") of objective reality in human perception. I argue that (a) dissolving this problem requires us to understand human perception as a rational power, that (b) a rational power is a power whose actualizations involve the actualization of conceptual capacities, and that (c) the actualizations of powers that involve the actualizations of conceptual capacities have conceptual contents. I discuss the different versions of this claim to be found in McDowell's writings since "Mind and World". Furthermore, I distinguish between two ways of reading the claim which I call the "apperceptive" and the "phenomenal" reading respectively. The first reading, I argue, is the one McDowell actually endorses, whereas the second reading, which is not a part of his position, is the one foisted on him in many of the critical engagements with his work.

The Illusion of Doubt confronts one of the most important questions
in philosophy and beyond: what can we know? The radical sceptic’s answer is ‘not very much’ if we cannot prove that we are not subject to (possibly permanent) deception. For centuries philosophers have been impressed by the radical sceptic’s move, but this book shows that the
radical sceptical problem turns out to be an illusion created by a mistaken picture of our evidential situation. This means that we don’t need to answer the radical sceptical problem ‘head on’, but rather to undermine the philosophical assumptions that it depends on. For without these assumptions, radical scepticism collapses all by itself. This result is highly significant, as it manages to dissolve one of the most intractable philosophical problems that has bedevilled some of the greatest minds until the present day.

Philosophers working in the wake of Sellars, such as Brandom and McDowell, think that there a fundamentally important distinction between ‘sapience’ and ‘sentience.’ Both sentience and sapience are ‘transcendental’ structures – they are posited to explain our cognitively significant experience, including (but not limited to) empirical knowledge – but they also must be adequately reflected in, or realized in, causal structures. Hence whatever structures and processes that we posit in the course of reflecting on the minimal necessary conditions for our cognitive capacities and incapacities must be correlated with structures and processes that are empirically confirmed and, to the extent possible, consistent with a scientific view of the world. Within this generally Sellarsian framework, I aim to criticize one key aspect of Sellars’s theory of perception concerning the role of sense-impressions (or sensations) as causally mediating our perceptual encounters with objects.  More specifically, I shall argue that Sellars was right to argue that we need to posit what he calls “sheer receptivity” in the interests of transcendental philosophy, but wrong to argue that sense-impressions were the best candidates to implement sheer receptivity in rerum natura. I shall then turn to recent work in the enactivist approach to philosophy of cognitive science, which emphasizes the structural coupling between sensorimotor skills and environmental affordances.  This structural coupling is a more promising candidate than sensations per se as the causal correlate of sheer receptivity.  I conclude by comparing the possibility of synthesizing inferentialism and enactivism with Huw Price’s “new bifurcation thesis”, and suggest that my approach is a more promising candidate for 21st-century Sellarsian pragmatism.

This is chapter 6 of my book on Rorty, an attempt to understand and defend to an extent his account of the uses of 'truth'. I'm posting it because I'm revisiting the topic and having reread it recently thought some might find it interesting. Any comments welcome!

Spätestens mit Beginn des neuen Jahrtausends hat sich das Computerspiel gesellschaftlich als relevantes ästhetisches Medium durchgesetzt. Mit dieser Anerkennung als ästhetisches und künstlerisches Phänomen stellt sich allerdings auch die Frage nach seinen diesbezüglichen Eigenarten. Daniel Martin Feiges neues Buch klärt in philosophischer Perspektive Begriff, Ästhetik und Kunstcharakter des Computerspiels. Dabei lässt es sich von der Annahme leiten, dass die Konturen ästhetischer Medien beständig neuverhandelt werden. Wer sich mit der Ästhetik des Computerspiels befasst, muss zugleich auch über die Ästhetik anderer Medien und Künste nachdenken.

This paper argues that Wittgenstein opposed theories of meaning, and did so for good reasons. Theories of meaning, in the sense discussed here, are attempts to explain what makes it the case that certain sounds, shapes, or movements are meaningful linguistic expressions. It is widely believed that Wittgenstein made fundamental contributions to this explanatory project. I argue, by contrast, that in both his early and later work, Wittgenstein endorsed a disjunctivist conception of language which rejects the assumption underlying the question that such theories seek to answer—namely, the assumption that the notion of a meaningful linguistic expression admits of non-circular analysis. Moreover, I give two arguments in favor of the view I ascribe to Wittgenstein: one based on later Wittgenstein's discussion of meaning skepticism, and one based on considerations concerning the identity of linguistic expressions.

THE CONTENT OF PERCEPTION Analysis of the debate between conceptualism and non-conceptualism.
Il lavoro è stato sviluppato presso l'Università degli Studi di Milano, supervisionato da Paolo Spinicci in qualità di Relatore e da Andrea Zhok in qualità di correlatore.

Moral particularism is often conceived as the view that there are no moral principles.
However, its most fêted accounts focus almost exclusively on rules regarding actions
and their features. Such action-centred particularism, I argue, is compatible with
generalism at the level of character traits. The resulting view is a form of particularist
virtue ethics. This endorses directives of the form ‘be X’ but rejects any implication
that the relevant x-ness must therefore always count in favour of an action.

This paper focuses on one of the major criticisms made to Aristotle's virtue ethics, namely that it lacks explicit moral action guidance. The same criticism has been addressed to later developments of virtue ethics. There have been several attempts to overcome this objection and to demonstrate that modern theories of virtue ethics do provide principles of right action. In this paper, I discuss mainly two such major attempts: the exemplarist approach and the virtue rules approach. My aim is to examine whether, if applied to Aristotle’s virtue ethics, these two approaches can provide a convincing answer to the criticism that Aristotle’s ethics does not offer explicit moral action guidance .

McDowell defends conceptualism about experiential content by arguing that contrary views of experience are forms of the Myth of the Given. The direct realist view of experience, which rejects experiential content all together, is thus according to McDowell a mythical view of experience. A series of defenders of direct realism have responded to McDowell’s accusations. However, the recent debate has revealed that there is very little agreement on the details of McDowell’s argument, let alone on how to respond to it. I will argue that the responses to McDowell given by thinkers such as Travis, Brewer, Kalderon and Johnson, all rest on various misunderstandings of his line of argument. The aim of this paper is to provide an interpretation of the Myth of the Given, which lives up to the dialectical role it plays in McDowell’s argumentation. I aim to elaborate the notions of reasons and the notion of conceptuality in play in McDowell’s writings. On this basis, I present an argument leading from the requirement that experience provides reasons for thought to the conclusion that experience must possess conceptual content.

In his philosophical proposal, McDowell draws on theoretical elements that can be found in Hegel's thought. The thesis of the " unboundedness of the conceptual " (UC) is one of the central theoretical aspects (if not the central theoretical aspect) that McDowell claims to share with Hegel. In this chapter, I claim that the Hegelian version of UC has a specific ontological and metaphysical import that implies an excess with respect to McDowell's " therapeutic " attitude. This excess in Hegel's version of UC does not simply amount to a meta-philosophical difference. Rather, it has decisive theoretical consequences, which can be recognised as further having repercussions on other theoretical aspects shared by McDowell and Hegel. In Sect. 8.1, I analyse McDowell's version of UC. In Sect. 8.2, I discuss the form UC assumes in Hegel's thought. Here I show that, unlike McDowell, Hegel defends a more robust form of conceptualism, which is the result of a (partly) different argumentative framework. Unlike McDowell, the objects of the world are not something immediate or a-conceptual, but are always already intrinsically ontologically mediated in a conceptual way, insofar as they are determined starting from the holistic articulation of the Concept. In Sect. 8.3, I show the repercussions of these two interpretations of UC on other theoretical claims that can be ascribed both to McDowell and Hegel, such as α) the denial that an immediate givenness can count as a justification for a belief, β) the conceptuality of sensible experience, γ) a non-subjectivistic account of reason, δ) the direct openness to the world.

This article turns to the Maysles brothers’ 1975 film Grey Gardens to problematize the philosophical assumptions at work in debates about objectivity and direct cinema. With a suitable picture of documentary objectivity we can avoid endorsing the claim that no film can be objective or the corollary that only documentaries that reflexively acknowledge the biases of their makers can succeed aesthetically or ethically. Against critics who have attacked Grey Gardens for its problematic claims to objectivity as well as theorists defending it for how it undermines objectivity, I argue that the film’s objective treatment of its subjects is part of its aesthetic and ethical achievement. In the context of observational documentary, being objective does not mean taking a purely dispassionate stance toward one’s subjects, but treating them without prejudice or moralism and letting them reveal themselves.

In this paper, I contest increasingly common "realist" interpretations of Hegel's theory of "the concept" (der Begriff), offering instead a "isomorphic" conception of the relation of concepts and the world. The isomorphism recommended, however, is metaphysically deflationary, for I show how Hegel's conception of conceptual form creates a conceptually internal standard for the adequacy of concepts. No "sideways-on" theory of the concept-world relationship is envisioned. This standard of conceptual adequacy is also "graduated" in that it allows for a lack of fit between concept and world. The possibility for a "maximally isomorphic" fit between concept and world obtains through the teleological realization of concepts, which marks especially the "artificial" world of human culture (law, art, religion, etc.). Some of the most seemingly exaggerated claims Hegel makes about the concept, I contend, can be understood when we consider the significance Hegel ascribes to human making, which is provided for in his conceptual theory. But my framework provides an interpretive key for the way Hegel sees concepts imperfectly realized in the natural world as well.

Anthropologische Fragen werden in der Philosophie wieder breit diskutiert, wobei neoaristotelische und neokantianische Ansätze dominieren. Daniel Martin Feige entwickelt in seinem neuen Buch einen alternativen Vorschlag, der die Frage nach dem Menschen aus der Perspektive der Hegel'schen Philosophie und der kritischen Theorie angeht. Der Mensch ist dasjenige Lebewesen, das sich zu dem macht, als was es sich versteht. Im Geiste Hegels wird damit die anthropologische Frage mit der Geschichtsphilosophie verbunden. Der Mensch zeigt sich so als ein Lebewesen, das durch Freiheit, Vernunft und Selbstbewusstsein charakterisiert ist – Grundbestimmungen, die in jeder historischen Epoche neu ausgehandelt werden müssen.

This is the 1996 Ferrater Mora Lecture that Rorty delivered at Girona, Spain. They were published in Catalan and Spanish. Some of the lecture were published in edited version in English. But the original manuscript had never appeared in full, as Rorty meant to organize and deliver it. Arguably this was the most mature presentation of his own version of pragmatism. The title in Spanish Read: Anti-Authoritarianism in Epistemology and Ethics. A Version. An important idea that Rorty carries through in these wonderful lecture is that we ought to see pragmatism as second reformation, as a reformation that extends to both ethics and epistemology. In the epilogue I reconstruct how these lectures related to his work from the nineties, and why he may have not pursued their publication in English (or alternatively, why he got so busy with his other work from the late 90s, in particular his lecture that became Achieving our Country.

Die sprachliche und soziale Natur der Erkenntnis ist eine Grundeinsicht der Moderne. Doch welchen Spielraum lässt sie noch der Kritik, der distanzierten Prüfung der eigenen Sprache und Lebensform? Vor dem Hintergrund des Werkes Stanley Cavells fragt dieses Buch nach dem Verhältnis von Lebensform und Selbsterkenntnis. In ungewohnter Weise liest es Wittgenstein und Foucault als komplementäre Antwortstrategien auf dieses Grundproblem: Philosophie muss als eine »Arbeit an sich« (Wittgenstein), als körperliche »Selbsttechnik« (Foucault) verstanden werden. Nicht ethische Programmatik, so kann gezeigt werden, sondern systematische Konsequenz führt zu einer Engführung von Philosophie und Lebenspraxis.

Quello di “fusione degli orizzonti” è senza dubbio uno dei concetti-chiave dell’ermeneutica filosofica di Gadamer. Introdotto in Verità e metodo per indicare l’integrazione reciproca tra l’orizzonte di partenza dell’interprete, determinato dai suoi pregiudizi e dalle sue aspettative di senso, e quello della “cosa stessa” che è in gioco nel testo da interpretare, tale concetto è stato successivamente anche applicato alla comprensione del linguaggio in quanto dialogo ed assunto come modello per lo studio dei rapporti tra culture diverse o per la comparazione tra paradigmi filosofici differenti. In questo libro si analizzano diversi aspetti della filosofia di Gadamer (estetica, etica, ontologia, linguaggio) sulla base del concetto di fusione degli orizzonti inteso in quest’ultima accezione.

What cognitive goods do children plausibly have a right to in an education? In attempting to answer this question, I begin with a puzzle centred around Feinberg's (2007) observation that a denial of certain cognitive goods can violate a child's right to an open future. I show that propositionalist, dispositionalist and objectualist characterisations of the kinds of cognitive goods children have a right to run in to problems. A promising alternative is then proposed and defended, one that is inspired in the main by Wittgenstein's (1969) 'hinge' epistemology as developed in his posthumous On Certainty. cognitive goods and epistemic rights What cognitive goods should an education provide? There are a number of ways to approach this question, and one useful place to begin is from a rights-based perspective: an education should afford at least those cognitive goods children plausibly have a right to. What cognitive goods are these? On a first pass, it seems reasonable to say that there are certain facts children have a right to know—and accordingly, that what children have a right to is some (propo-sitional) knowledge, leaving it open exactly which specific knowledge. Extrapolating from this answer, we can call a more general position vis-à-vis the cognitive goods children plausibly have a right to 'propositionalism' , where propositionalism is the claim that the kind of cognitive goods to which children have a right in education are propositional goods.

The expression 'second nature' can be used in two different ways. The first allows phronēsis (practical wisdom) to count as the sort of thing a second nature is. The second speaks of second natures as distinct ethical outlooks. I argue that a failure to distinguish these ways of speaking of 'second nature' is philosophically significant, in that we are thereby prevented from seeing that phronēsis stands on a different logical footing from ethical outlooks. Recognizing their distinctness allows the important question of the relation between them to be posed. Phronēsis, I argue, should be understood as the unity of the ethical virtues. It remains invariant as ethical outlooks vary. Seeing this allows us to pose the important question, otherwise obscured, how phronēsis is mediated through specific cultural contexts. I end with a concrete example of radical ethical upheaval to illustrate phronēsis as operative across ethical outlooks.

I explore the role of manners in the life of virtue, particularly with regard to their role in cultivating and then expressing virtue. The topic of manners is largely neglected among moral philosophers and when manners are discussed they are often seen as a separate domain from morality and as arbitrary social conventions that involve a significant degree of dishonesty. I seek to demonstrate how manners have an integral role to play in the moral life and how the concerns about arbitrariness and dishonesty can be overcome. Discussions about manners typically focus on their role in the social life of adults. However, to properly appreciate the integral role of manners in the moral life we need to focus, first of all, on how teaching good manners to children is one of the key ways that we initiate them into the life of virtue. The approach developed here is strongly Aristotelian-cum-Confucian in character, whereas recent philosophical discussions of manners that have seen moral value in them have tended to adopt a Kantian approach. Teaching good manners can be understood as a form of habituation into virtue as manners are patterns of behavior, often informed by culture and tradition. I discuss three crucial functions of good manners: (1) they help social life to go well; (2) they involve ways of showing respect or reverence for that which is respect-worthy or reverence-worthy; and (3) they elevate (or ennoble) our animal nature via an acquired second nature.

This dissertation focuses on the peculiar status of perceptual content in contemporary accounts of conceptualism. Specifically, conceptualists find themselves in a dilemma: either deny any account of perceptual content (e.g., Robert Brandom), or develop one based on our "common-sense" categories (e.g., John McDowell). This has unfortunate consequences in regards to contemporary philosophy of mind, both regarding studies of perception and in understanding animal cognition. The upshot of this dissertation is two-fold: first, it shows why this is a false dilemma, and second, it shows that both horns of the dilemma are unsatisfactory.

To show this is a false dilemma, I open with (what I dub) Sellars's "lost insight" from the myth of Jones: the perceptual categories adopted need not be unrevisable. This simple claim proves to be a helpful key for recognizing the false moves made in numerous historical figures up through the present.

To show why both horns are unsatisfactory, I present a series of historical sketches on figures in the history of conceptualism and "the given." I show that this dilemma has a long history originating in Immanuel Kant's work on perception. This is surprising because Kant's version of conceptualism is very different from contemporary accounts--despite efforts to assimilate him to our present. I argue the same dilemma recurs in very different forms of conceptualism and with many and incompatible ideas of perceptual content. I focus on Bertrand Russell, Rudolf Carnap, C.I. Lewis, and John McDowell, highlighting how each figure falls on one horn of the other of the dilemma: either denying perceptual content any independent role, or endorsing a "common-sense" account that is supposedly obvious.

I conclude that conceptualism can endorse an account of perceptual content so long as it abandons the notion that "common-sense" is impervious to historical trends or the findings of science. As Sellars recognized, this does not require a return to the myth of the given; rather, it provides us with a far more robust and insightful conceptualism and more useful account of perception.

This book presents a powerful new film-philosophy through the cinema of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. Mathew Abbott argues that Kiarostami’s films carry out cinematic thinking: they do not just illustrate pre-existing philosophical ideas, but do real philosophical work.

Crossing the divide between analytic and continental philosophy, he draws on Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, John McDowell, Alice Crary, Noël Carroll, Giorgio Agamben, and Martin Heidegger, bringing out the thinking at work in Kiarostami’s most recent films: Taste of Cherry, The Wind Will Carry Us, ABC Africa, Ten, Five, Shirin, Certified Copy, and Like Someone in Love.

Abbas Kiarostami and Film-Philosophy shows that the philosophical significance of film consists less in its ability to make a positive contribution to theorising than in how it beguiles, goads, and rebukes it.

Hegels Philosophie des Geistes erhebt den Anspruch, den Menschen im Ganzen – durch und durch – als »geistig« zu denken. Thomas Oehl aktualisiert diesen Anspruch, indem er ihn an die gegenwärtige philosophische Debatte um die sinnliche Wahrnehmung heranträgt und damit kritisch in diese eingreift: Bereits in der sinnlichen Wahrnehmung verhält sich der Mensch aktiv und nicht, wie es in seinem naheliegenden Selbst(miss)verständnis scheint, passiv. In der Wahrnehmung konstituiert der Mensch Natur und Welt, und ist eben dadurch selbst nicht einfach Teil der Natur oder Welt, sondern »Geist«. »Geist« ist so, wie Hegel sagt, das »absolut Erste« der Natur. Wie Oehl weiter zeigt, schließt dies ein, dass »Geist« sich gerade dort vollendet, wo er den Menschen von seinem Selbstmissverständnis befreit, Natur zu sein. Damit stellt sich »Geist« als etwas heraus, das mehr ist als bloß der Mensch, da es den Menschen über seine Selbstverkehrung hinausführt. So wird ein neuer Zugang zu Hegels Philosophie des absoluten Geistes gewonnen, die eben dieses Geschehen als von Gott bewirkte Befreiung des Menschen von seiner Selbstverkehrung begreift, wie es in Kunst, Religion und Philosophie Gestalt gewinnt.

The paper offers an answer to John McDowell’s question of why it matters to Hegel that Geist has a history. Spirit’s content is revelation (Enc. § 383), and spirit realizes itself as what it is – revelation – by unfolding into two dimensions: a finite and an infinite subject. The infinite subject successively gives new forms of thinking to the finite subject, and this succession is history. This is shown more concretely with regard to the historical development of (philosophical) conceptions of self-consciousness from Descartes via Kant to Hegel. From this an overall picture of Hegel’s philosophy of spirit emerges through which its culmination in absolute spirit and, in particular, religion becomes conceivable and according to which there is a leap between Hegel’s philosophy and the pagan world. Thus, the paper is directed against two widespread tendencies in current readings of Hegel: the tendency to cut off or downplay absolute spirit in favor of subjective and objective spirit,
and the tendency to assimilate Hegel’s philosophy of spirit to Aristotle’s philosophy of soul and life.

I suggest that we can read Marx in the light of recent analytic, neo-Hegelian thought. I summarize the Pittsburgh School philosophers' claims about the myth of the given, the claim that human experience is conceptual all the way out, and that we live in a space of reasons. I show how Hegel has been read in those terms, and then apply that reading of Hegel to Marx's argument that capital is akin to what Hegel called Geist, or spirit. We can understand capitalism as a space of reasons that is contradictory: while the space of reasons is supposed to make human freedom possible, our space of reasons makes freedom impossible. Reading Marx in this way is helpful, because it avoids the flaws of analytical Marxism, existentialism and structuralism. However, it raises a large problem of its own: Can the theory of the space of reasons be applied to a society that is not free of alienation? I argue that it can, but only in ways that would not satisfy the analytic neo-Hegelians themselves.

La concepción disyuntiva del conocimiento perceptual plantea un  argumento  a  favor  de  la  no  anulable  pretensión  de  objetividad  de  la experiencia que parece dar sentido a la idea de que la mente “accede” al mundo. J. McDowell ha propuesto comprender esta concepción como “material para un argumento trascendental” depurado de idealismo. A través de una comparación con la noción de “uso de la intuición” de G. Simmel, y su crítica al esquematismo kantiano, este trabajo examina algunas razones por las que el disyuntivismo y el intuicionismo pueden ofrecer un “punto de  vista  trascendental”  no  idealista.  En  el  contexto  de  la  epistemología naturalizada, los resultados de ambas concepciones se muestran relevantes para  la explicación  del  arraigo  de  algunos  contenidos  intuitivos  básicos vinculados al carácter ineludible de la pretensión de objetividad en nuestro entramado de creencias sobre el mundo.

The  disjunctive  conception  of  perceptual  knowledge  sets  out an argument for the non-defeasible objective purport of experience, which seems to make sense of the idea that the mind “access” the world. J. McDowell  has  proposed  to  understand  this  conception  as  “material  for  a transcendental argument” without suspicion of idealism. Drawing a parallel with Simmel’s notion of “use of intuition” and his critique of Kantian schematism, this paper examines some reasons why disjunctivism and intuitionism can offer a non-idealistic “transcendental point of view”. In the
context  of  the  naturalized  epistemology,  the  results  of  both  approaches
may  be  relevant  to  explain  the  roots  of  some  basic  intuitive  contents  related  to  the  inescapable  character  of  the  objective  purport  in  our  web  of beliefs about the world.

CONTENTS (below; Note: Eric and I received permission from Jeff Sicha of Ridgeview Publishing Ltd. to put the full pdf of this book up online):
Willem deVries: 'Kant, Rosenberg, and the Mirror of Philosophy'
David Landy:  'The Premise That Even Hume Must Accept'
William G. Lycan:  'Rosenberg on Proper Names'
Douglas Long:  'Why Life is Necessary for Mind: The Significance of Animate Behavior'
Dorit Bar-On and Mitchell Green: 'Lionspeak: Communication, Expression, and Meaning'
David Rosenthal:  'The Mind and Its Expression'
Jeffrey Sicha:  'The Manifest Image: the Sensory and the Mental'
Bruce Aune:  'Rosenberg on Knowing'
Joseph C. Pitt  'Sellarsian Antifoundationalism and Scientific Realism'
Matthew Chrisman: 'The Aim of Belief and the Goal of Truth: Reflections on Rosenberg'
James O'Shea:  'Conceptual Thinking and Nonconceptual Content: A Sellarsian Divide'
Anton Koch:  'Persons as Mirroring the World'
Eric M. Rubenstein:  'Form and Content, Substance and Stuff'
Ralf Stoecker:  'On Being a Realist About Death'
William G. Lycan:  'Biographical Remarks on Jay F. Rosenberg'
Scholarly Publications of Jay F. Rosenberg

Introductory essay to the collection "I that is We, We that is I" (ed. by Italo Testa and Luigi Ruggiu, Brill Books, 2016). In this book an international group of philosophers explore the many facets of Hegel’s formula which expresses the recognitive and social structures of human life. The book offers a guiding thread for the reconstruction of crucial motifs of contemporary thought such as the socio-ontological paradigm; the action-theoretical model in moral and social philosophy; the question of naturalism; and the reassessment of the relevance of work and power for our understanding of human life. This collection addresses the shortcomings of Kantian and constructivist normative approaches to social practices and practical rationality it involves. It sheds new light on Hegel’s take on metaphysics and puts into question some presuppositions of the post-metaphysical interpretative paradigm

The close connection often cited between Hegel and Wilfrid Sellars is not only said to lie in their common negative challenges to the “framework of givenness,” but also in the positive lesson drawn from these challenges. In particular, the critique of givenness is thought to lead to a conceptualist view of perceptual experience. In this essay, I challenge the common idea that Hegel’s critique of givenness provides specific support for a conceptualist view. The notion that Hegel, if anyone, is a conceptualist depends on faulty assumptions about the conceptual character of all language, including the indexical expressions Hegel discusses in “Sense-Certainty.” I first show that these assumptions are often imported into Hegel’s texts but are also out of keeping with his own systematic views of concepts and language. To avoid a merely verbal disagreement, however, I then explore the features of Sellarsian semantics needed to make a thorough conceptualism plausible. Sellars’ “picturing” theory is necessary to show how non-predicate terms (like indexicals) have meaning, but in order to put this feature of Sellars’ semantics in service of a conceptualist view, one must abandon the descriptive character of concepts that is a minimal feature of Hegelian thought.

I will show, starting from a confrontation of their main theses related to human language, why one of the major sources of disagreement between Ruth Millikan (1993) and John McDowell (1999) concerning the naturalization of rationality is how Millikan uses the concept of representation (1984, 2004, 2005). That is to say that one of the main questions raised by the naturalization of philosophical discourse in Millikan’s semantics lies in her emphasis that representations as vehicles of meanings are something that could be explained by science, by biology and psychology. If we expect, like McDowell does, that representations are a kind of proposition, at first glance there would be no problem in speaking about them from a traditional point of view. But when they are transformed in an empirical phenomenon, they lose the kind of quality necessary for meaning in a classical sense: they are linked to empirical phenomena or by laws or by norms. My final purpose in this paper will be to indicate the possibility of an alternative to both views. It consists in weakening the notion of representation so as to retrieve it from the center of the discussion about meaning and focus on social behavior instead, although admitting the value of scientific explanations of mind and brain.

Whereas the recent exchange between Dreyfus and McDowell has largely highlighted differences in their respective accounts, my focus in the following will be on what I take to be some of their shared assumptions. More
specifically, I wish to argue that Dreyfus’s frequent reference to mindless coping is partly motivated by his endorsement of a conception of mindedness that is considerably closer to McDowell’s view than one might
initially have assumed. In a second step, I will discuss to what extent the notions of mindlessness and conceptual mindedness can do justice to the first-personal character of our experiential life. In pursuing this issue, I will at the same time challenge Dreyfus’s claim that his position is one with a
venerable phenomenological ancestry.