Hubert Dreyfus has defended a novel view of agency, most notably in his debate with John McDowell. Dreyfus argues that expert actions are primarily unreflective and do not involve conceptual activity. In unreflective action, embodied know-how plays the role reflection and conceptuality play in the actions of novices. Dreyfus employs two arguments to support his conclusion: the argument from speed and the phenomenological argument. I argue that Dreyfus's argumentative strategies are not successful, since he relies on a dubious assumption about (...) concepts and reflection. I suggest that Dreyfus is committed to a minimal view of conceptuality in action. (shrink)

I examine two explanatory models of choking: the representationalist model and the anti-representationalist model. The representationalist model is based largely on Anderson's ACT model of procedural knowledge and is developed by Masters, Beilock and Carr. The antirepresentationalist model is based on dynamical models of cognition and embodied action and is developed by Dreyfus who employs an antirepresentational view of know-how. I identify the models' similarities and differences. I then suggest that Dreyfus is wrong to believe representational activity requires reflection and (...) attention. I also argue that the representationalist model of choking is preferable, since some embodied actions require appeals to representations, something not available to Dreyfus's anti-representational model. (shrink)

Scholarship on Kant's practical philosophy has often overlooked its reception in the early days of post-Kantian philosophy and German Idealism. This volume of new essays illuminates that reception and how it informed the development of practical philosophy between Kant and Hegel. The essays discuss, in addition to Kant, Hegel and Fichte, relatively little-known thinkers such as Pistorius, Ulrich, Maimon, Erhard, E. Reimarus, Reinhold, Jacobi, F. Schlegel, Humboldt, Dalberg, Gentz, Rehberg, and Möser. Issues discussed include the empty formalism objection, the separation (...) between right and morality, freedom and determinism, nihilism, the right to revolution, ideology, and the limits of the liberal state. Taken together, the essays provide an historically informed and philosophically nuanced picture of the development of post-Kantian practical philosophy. (shrink)

Fichte's Foundations of Natural Right was one of the most influential books in nineteenth-century philosophy. It was read carefully by Schelling, Hegel, and Marx, and initiated a tradition in German philosophy that considers human subjectivity to be relational and intersubjective, thus requiring relations of recognition between subjects. The essays in this volume highlight this little-understood book's most important ideas and innovations. They offer discussions of Fichte's conception of freedom, self-consciousness, coercion, the summons, the body, and human rights, together with new (...) analyses of his deduction of right, his views on the social contract, and his arguments for the separation of right from morality. The essays expand and deepen ongoing debates in the scholarship and chart new avenues of thought about Fichte's most enduring work of political philosophy. They will be essential reading for students and scholars of German Idealism, nineteenth-century philosophy, and the history of political thought. (shrink)

Illuminating new essays on Fichte's 1804 Wissenschaftslehre, or The Science of Knowing.

Fichte’s Foundations of Natural Right develops an intersubjective view of individual self-consciousness. The central concept of this view is his notion of the summons, which he characterizes as upbringing. I argue that Fichte has a developmental view of self-consciousness in which a subject is brought up, through relations of recognition, to be first an individual human being that is capable of responding to reasons and second a political individual that respects other political individuals’ rights. My argument shows that Fichte has (...) two conceptions of recognition, elementary recognition and political recognition, as well as two conceptions of the individual, the individual human being and the political individual. I examine Fichte’s conception of Erziehung, or upbringing, and particularly, Fichte’s remarks about child rearing in order to disambiguate the two types of recognition and individuality. (shrink)

The essay provides a new interpretation of Fichte’s deduction of the external world that considers the argument to be motivated not by epistemic concerns but by concerns about the possibility of freedom. In defending this view, I critically examine Frederick Beiser’s reconstruction of Fichte’s deduction, which characterizes the argument as refuting external world skepticism, exactly the threat by which Fichte is not troubled. I claim that Fichte is troubled by ethical skepticism, the view that the freedom required for self-consciousness is (...) not possible. Establishing the possibility of the freedom involved in self-consciousness requires an external world suitable for such a form of freedom. An implication of this claim is that the world that Fichte deduces is an intersubjective or social world. (shrink)

It is, we think, fair to say that scholarship on post-Kantian philosophy1 has traditionally tended to focus on theoretical philosophy rather than on practical philoso...

According to J. G. Fichte, for a science to possess systematic form the science must begin with a first principle known with certainty and each proposition within the science must be validly connected to the first principle. The content of the Wissenschaftslehre consists of essentially one kind of content, what he calls “the acts of the human mind” He also holds that the Wissenschaftslehre provides each science its own first principle, thus making up part of its content. Following his first (...) publications, F. W. J. Schelling began to simultaneously develop a philosophy of nature, or Naturphilosophie, and to systematize his view of transcendental philosophy. His Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature and First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature were followed by the System of Transcendental Idealism. Where Spinoza attempted to provide a model of the unconditional as a self‐causing substance, Schelling conceives of the unconditional as the absolute or self‐positing. (shrink)

Tom Huhn’s challenging book provides subtle readings of three philosophers’ aesthetic projects, two of which have been overlooked by many American philosophers. Mimesis is the guiding theme of Huhn’s reading, and it gives him a unique access to certain aesthetic and cognitive theories. While Huhn’s book is relatively short, its themes are vast. I will only discuss what I take to be the heart of Huhn’s project: revealing the relationship between society and aesthetic pleasure.

Tom Huhn’s challenging book provides subtle readings of three philosophers’ aesthetic projects, two of which have been overlooked by many American philosophers. Mimesis is the guiding theme of Huhn’s reading, and it gives him a unique access to certain aesthetic and cognitive theories. While Huhn’s book is relatively short, its themes are vast. I will only discuss what I take to be the heart of Huhn’s project: revealing the relationship between society and aesthetic pleasure.

This excellent collection features consistently illuminating and often groundbreaking work on issues raised by Fichte's philosophy of right. All twelve chapters make new contributions to specialized debates. Most will be accessible to nonspecialists nonetheless, and many will richly repay careful consideration by readers interested in Fichte, post-Kantian political theory, or classic debates about rights and the state.

Engagements with Contemporary Literary and Critical Theory is a wide-ranging but accessible introduction that illuminates the field of theory through a variety of useful and relevant examples. Covering all key theories and theorists, this book looks at the relation of theory to form, discourses, subjectivity, media and networks, and environments. Organized thematically, Engagements with Contemporary Literary and Critical Theory illuminates the field by focusing on the concepts and methodologies of key thinkers, while also providing historical introductions that contextualize the latest (...) developments with regard to forms; discourses; subjectivities and embodiments; media, networks, and machines; and animals, affects, objects, and environments. Each chapter includes examples from a canonical novel, a contemporary text, and a new media artefact, while textboxes regularly introduce additional emerging or overlooked theorists of interest. An ideal guide for undergraduates studying literary theory, this book will give readers the background they need to continue their own fruitful explorations of this vibrant field of study. (shrink)

Bd. 1. A-B -- Bd. 2. C-F -- Bd. 3. G-Inn -- Bd. 4. Ins-Loc.

This important collection of lectures and essays was regarded by Gabriel Marcel as the best introduction to his thought.

v. 1. Reflection & mystery -- v. 2. Faith & reality.

The Simple Counterfactual Analysis (SCA) was once considered the most promising analysis of disposition ascriptions. According to SCA, disposition ascriptions are to be analyzed in terms of counterfactual conditionals. In the last few decades, however, SCA has become the target of a battery of counterexamples. In all counterexamples, something seems to be interfering with a certain object’s having or not having a certain disposition thus making the truth-values of the disposition ascription and of its associated counterfactual come apart. Intuitively, however, (...) it would seem that, if all interferences were absent, the disposition ascription and its associated conditional would have the same truth-value. Although this idea may seem obvious, it is far from obvious how to implement it. In fact, it has become widely assumed that the content of qualifying ceteris paribus clauses (such as ‘if all interferences were absent’) cannot be specified in a clear and non-circular manner. In this paper, I will argue that this assumption is wrong. I will develop an analysis of disposition ascriptions, the Interference-Free Counterfactual Analysis, which relies on a clear and non-circular definition of the notion of interference and avoids the standard counterexamples to SCA while vindicating the intuition that disposition ascriptions and counterfactual conditionals are intimately related. (Please note that an erratum has been issued for the published version of this paper. It is recommended to read the self-archived version of the paper.). (shrink)

Is morality intuitive or deliberative? The distinction can obscure the role of folk moral theories in moral judgment; judgments may arise 'intuitively' yet result from abstract theoretical and philosophical commitments that participate in 'deliberative' reasoning.

The Wisdom We're Born With explores the desire to live that we carry with us from birth. While some people may believe that it's impossible to acquire perspective like Gottlieb's without a similarly catastrophic life experience, the fact is that every infant possesses a raw need to keep on going. Gottlieb's book awakens us to the idea of our natural perspective, traces the growth and diminishment of that perspective over the years, and brings us back to advanced age, (...) where it recurs once more. If we are aware of this capacity in ourselves, we can actively nurture it, enabling ourselves to embrace the desire to live and grow every day, whether we're joyful or in the grip of a powerful depression. In a time of anxiety and worry, Gottlieb's words provide comfort and strength-if we can remember the wisdom we're born with, we can possess a limitless energy to keep fighting. (shrink)

Famously, in the essay Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality (Prize Essay), Kant attempts to distance himself from the Wolffian model of philosophical inquiry. In this respect, Kant scholars have pointed out Kant’s claim that philosophy should not imitate the method of mathematics and his appeal to Newton’s “analytic method.” In this article, I argue that there is an aspect of Kant’s critique of the Wolffian model that has been neglected. Kant presents a powerful (...) attack of the idea that philosophy should proceed through the analysis of concepts and argues that we should give up the aim of arriving at “complete” concepts as one of its fundamental desiderata. Importantly, this attack of philosophy conceived as conceptual analysis is distinctive and original if one compares it with Kant’s critique of analysis in the Critique of Pure Reason, which rests on the idea that analysis is insufficient to ground substantial metaphysical truths. I also make an additional point: Scholars have debated whether the appeal to Newton’s analytic method involves a form of empiricism. I submit that this debate is ill-conceived because Kant uses a notion of “given concepts” that is indeterminate with respect to their a priori or a posteriori status. (shrink)

The volume deals with the history of logic, the question of the nature of logic, the relation of logic and mathematics, modal or alternative logics (many-valued, relevant, paraconsistent logics) and their relations, including translatability, to classical logic in the Fregean and Russellian sense, and, more generally, the aim or aims of philosophy of logic and mathematics. Also explored are several problems concerning the concept of definition, non-designating terms, the interdependence of quantifiers, and the idea of an assertion sign. The contributions (...) concerned with Wittgenstein's investigations into the philosophy of logic and mathematics pursue issues relating to logical necessity, the undeniability of the law of the excluded middle, and the source of self-evidence, often characterized in the literature as the "rule-following considerations". Additionally, they examine Wittgenstein's attitudes towards the very idea of set-theory as a possible foundation for arithmetic. The volume also includes a number of contributions on specific issues concerning Wittgenstein's views on moral and religious judgements. (shrink)

_Contents:_ Translator's Introduction_ Selected Bibliography Note on the Text _ The Vocation of Man__ Preface Book One: Doubt Book Two: Knowledge Book Three: Faith.

This edition of Marcel's inspiring Homo Viator has been updated to includle fifty-seven pages of new material available for the first time in English, making this the first English-language edition to conform to the standard French edition. Here, Christianity's foremost existentialist of the twentieth century gives us a prodigious personal insight on 'man on the way' that will reinforce and commend our own pilgrimages in hope. Book jacket.

The primary objective of this book is to open space for rethinking the relationship between art and politics. It seeks to combat one of the fundamental assumptions that has plagued many of the previous debates on this issue: that art and politics are distinct entities definable in terms of common properties, and that they have privileged points of intersection, which can be determined once and for all in terms of an established formula. This common sense assumption is rooted in a (...) transcendent illusion according to which there are more or less fixed characteristics that unify our terms, concepts, and practices in such a way as to guarantee their meaning. Against this substantialist approach, Radical History & the Politics of Art argues for a praxeological account that begins the other way around by analyzing specific cultural practices without presupposing a conceptual unity behind them. Such an orientation is radically historicist in the sense that it recognizes that all of our practices—be they linguistic, theoretical, aesthetic or political—are historically constituted and that they are necessarily part of a temporal dynamic. Hence the contingent nature of the labels used to classify various practices or even identify ‘practice’ as such. Radical history thereby proposes a significant departure from the extant debates on art and politics by maintaining that there is no ‘art’ or ‘politics’ in general, nor a singular relation between them. There are only historically constituted practices in various conjunctures, some of which have been labeled, through practical acts of denomination, as ‘artistic’ or ‘political.’ Instead of proposing one more response to the oft-repeated question ‘what is the relationship between Art and Politics?’ this book seeks to overcome the presuppositions that plague such a question. It thereby changes the very nature of the investigation by asking: ‘how do the diverse aspects of practices identified as ‘aesthetic’ and ‘political’ overlap, intertwine and sometimes merge in precise socio-historical force fields of action? (shrink)

The intellectual resistance to totalitarian regimes can take many forms. This remarkable volume portrays one such story of resistance in Romania during the reign of Ceausescu: that of Constantin Noica, one of the country's foremost intellectuals. The Paltinis Diary is a wonderful homage to an intellectual master and to the power of intellect and freedom. The book will be of interest to philosophers, non-philosophers alike, and to anyone who seeks to grasp the true meaning of survival under totalitarian conditions.

From mass murder to genocide, slavery to colonial suppression, acts of atrocity have lives that extend far beyond the horrific moment. They engender trauma that echoes for generations, in the experiences of those on both sides of the act. Gabriele Schwab reads these legacies in a number of narratives, primarily through the writing of postwar Germans and the descendents of Holocaust survivors. She connects their work to earlier histories of slavery and colonialism and to more recent events, such as South (...) African Apartheid, the practice of torture after 9/11, and the "disappearances" that occurred during South American dictatorships. Schwab's texts include memoirs, such as Ruth Kluger's _Still Alive_ and Marguerite Duras's _La Douleur_; second-generation accounts by the children of Holocaust survivors, such as Georges Perec's _W_, Art Spiegelman's _Maus_, and Philippe Grimbert's _Secret_; and second-generation recollections by Germans, such as W. G. Sebald's _Austerlitz_, Sabine Reichel's _What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?_, and Ursula Duba's _Tales from a Child of the Enemy_. She also incorporates her own reminiscences of growing up in postwar Germany, mapping interlaced memories and histories as they interact in psychic life and cultural memory. Schwab concludes with a bracing look at issues of responsibility, reparation, and forgiveness across the victim/perpetrator divide. (shrink)

Recent epidemiological research on the social determinants of health has been used to attack an important framework, associated with Norman Daniels, that depicts healthcare as special. My aim is to rescue the idea that healthcare has special importance in society, although specialness will turn out to be mainly limited to clinical care. I build upon the link between Daniels's theory and the work of John Rawls to develop a conception of public justification liberalism that is suitable to the field of (...) justice and health. I argue that, from the perspective of public justification liberalism, (clinical) healthcare deserves special status. (shrink)

Intimacy: From Transformation to Transmutation The paper reflects the historical and current dynamism of the concept of intimacy. Besides differences between scientific disciplines in understanding what the substance of intimacy is, the recent discourse on change in intimacy has been dominated by the transformation theme introduced by Anthony Giddens (1992). Led by reflections of Richard Sennett (1986) the author draws attention to the opposite aspect of change in intimacy—the change in content, or the "transmutation" of intimacy. Transmutation of intimacy—the substitution (...) of the satisfaction of intimate needs with identity creation—not only contests the very essence of intimacy, but also constitutes a significant challenge for the project of intimate citizenship (Plummer 2003). (shrink)

In this paper, I distinguish three general approaches to public trust in science, which I call the individual approach, the semi-social approach, and the social approach, and critically examine their proposed solutions to what I call the problem of harmful distrust. I argue that, despite their differences, the individual and the semi-social approaches see the solution to the problem of harmful distrust as consisting primarily in trying to persuade individual citizens to trust science and that both approaches face two general (...) problems, which I call the problem of overidealizing science and the problem of overburdening citizens. I then argue that in order to avoid these problems we need to embrace a (thoroughly) social approach to public trust in science, which emphasizes the social dimensions of the reception, transmission, and uptake of scientific knowledge in society and the ways in which social forces influence both positively and negatively the trustworthiness of science. (shrink)

Neither secular moral theory nor religious ethics have had much place for persons in need of constant physical help and cognitive support, nor for those who provide care for them. Writing as the father of a fourteen-year-old daughter with multiple disabilities, I will explore some of moral issues that arise here, both from the point of view of the disabled child and from that of the child's caretaker(s).