This article takes issue with the formalism problem arguably pertaining to Habermas's conception of communicative rationality and discursive justification. Beginning with the Hegelian premises of Habermas's theory of mutual understanding and communicative rationality, the article proceeds to make Kant's doctrine of reflective judgement fruitful for a critique of Habermas's restriction of reasons to discursively articulated endorsements, the 'force of the better reasons'. The argument consists in showing that discursive justification must rely upon endorsements of particulars exhibited in right judgements, and (...) that such endorsements must be expressed or articulated to yield public manifestations of discursive orientations and commitments, constituting what is referred to as 'communicative experience'. On the account presented here, the rational significance of particulars is revealed in the expressive attitude that allows or admits non-discursive constraints to the conception of rational justification. The promise of such an account - as premised upon Kant's insights in his third Critique - consists in its capability to avoid the one-sided formalism of discursive rationality, incorporating ethical, expressive and aesthetic dimensions to our rational self-conception. Key Words: aesthetic experience • communicative experience • concrete other • discourse-ethics • ethical life • feminism • Habermas • Hegel • Kant • morality • rational justification • reflective judgement • world-disclosure. (shrink)

This article considers the treatment of intersubjectivity as the core of Husserl's transcendental phenomenology. From this standpoint it identifies the problematic of Husserl's theory of the "experience of the Other", which Husserl exposes in his commentaries on Descartes V Meditation. The paper draws a parallel between Husserl and Kant in order to clarify the Husserlian notions, and finally shows the difficulties of Husserl's approach due to his assumption of the premises of the "Subjektsphilosophie".

Book reviews: Adorno, Theodor W., Metaphysik. Begriff und Probleme (reviewed by Ståle R.S. Finke).

This article takes its point of departure from the second (embodied) linguistic turn represented by the enactivist notion of humans as linguistic bodies, using resources from Hans Georg Gadamer in order to propose a view of the relation between art and everyday experience as one of symbolic transformation. Conceiving art as a form of linguistic phenomenon wherein one can engage in original situations of communication, this view rejects both autonomist and direct continuity views of the art-everyday relation. We start by (...) situating the idea of linguistic bodies within the enactive approach, spelling out relevant aspects concerning the significance of language for human life and perception (Sect. 2). Then we embark on a discussion of aspects of Shaun Gallagher’s and Alva Noë’s enactivist perspectives on art experience, highlighting places where their views align with and depart from ours (Sect. 3). The last two sections aim to lay out the transformative view in more detail, proposing a pluralistic understanding of art media and a view of art and art experience as modes of ideational, embodied thought (Sects. 4 and 5). (shrink)

This collection of essays by leading international philosophers considers central themes in the ethics of Danish philosopher Knud Ejler Løgstrup (1905–1981). Løgstrup was a Lutheran theologian much influenced by phenomenology and by strong currents in Danish culture, to which he himself made important contributions. The essays in What Is Ethically Demanded? K. E. Løgstrup’s Philosophy of Moral Life are divided into four sections. The first section deals predominantly with Løgstrup’s relation to Kant and, through Kant, the system of morality in (...) general. The second section focuses on how Løgstrup stands in connection with Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Levinas. The third section considers issues in the development of Løgstrup’s ethics and how it relates to other aspects of his thought. The final section covers certain central themes in Løgstrup’s position, particularly his claims about trust and the unfulfillability of the ethical demand. The volume includes a previously untranslated early essay by Løgstrup, “The Anthropology of Kant’s Ethics,” which defines some of his basic ethical ideas in opposition to Kant’s. The book will appeal to philosophers and theologians with an interest in ethics and the history of philosophy. (shrink)

This is an interesting intellectual biography of the early years of Merleau-Ponty's philosophical life. The author claims a clear change of thinking took place in 1939, when Merleau-Ponty began to read some of Husserl's manuscripts, and attempts to sketch his thought up to that point. He gives biographical data on his early life; analyzes his first two publications, on Scheler and Marcel; and describes his relationship with Sartre and other major figures of the time. He claims that the philosophical problem (...) bothering Merleau-Ponty at the time of La structure du comportement was that of reconciling a reflective approach to man with the scientific, objective approach. This dilemma was resolved in the philosophy of perceptual experience, in which the perceiver is taken as both a part of the world and the bodily subject that enjoys the world. Geraets observes that Merleau-Ponty tries to avoid the classical transcendental philosophy, and finds the foundation of philosophy not in a pure subject but in the process of experiencing; in this he differs even from Husserl, who provided him with the key to avoid the nagging objectivism of his early works by showing that the true transcendentals were concrete ingredients like the world, perception, the body, and place, and not the forms of scientific thinking or pure intellect. Geraets gives a long commentary on La structure du comportement; shows the influence of Bergson and the psychologists on Merleau-Ponty; and traces in detail the influence of essays by Fink and Landgrebe, with their Heideggerian dimensions. There is a preface by Emmanuel Levinas, and a ten-page bibliography of the publications of Merleau-Ponty, listed chronologically in order of appearance.--R. S. (shrink)

Adorno's conception of conceptually articulated experience can be defended and made fruitful for a critical philosophy after the so-called linguistic turn. The aim is both to answer the criticisms raised by Jürgen Habermas and others that Adorno's philosophy remains bound by the premises of a subject-centred philosophy, and to criticize social-pragmatism from the vantage-point of Adorno's philosophy of language. It is shown that Adorno is committed to a picture of experience very much in line with the recent views of John (...) McDowell, which extends the space of reasons beyond the space of concepts. Further, it is shown that non-inferential justification can be combined with an expressivist picture of judgment. Finally, it is argued that what is called the extended space of reasons is ultimately social; that representation, the aboutness of thought, serves expressive roles in a socially articulated space of reason-giving. The advantage of Adorno's position vis-à-vis a one-sided social-pragmatism consists in his defence of what is called subjective-material proprieties of judgment. Adorno's idea that the extended space of reasons implies the acknowledgement of what he refers to as the non-identical within conceptually articulated experience is thus reconstructed and defended. Such non-identity, it is claimed, is exhibited in successful art-works which thereby ought to be counted as forms of reasoning. On this basis, Adorno's philosophy acquires critical and normative significance after the linguistic turn. (shrink)

The perception of meaningful patterns in random arrangements and unrelated events takes place in our everyday lives, coined apophenia, synchronicity, or the experience of meaningful coincidences. However, we do not know yet what predicts this phenomenon. To investigate this, we re-analyzed a combined data set of two daily diary studies with a total of N = 169 participants (mean age 29.95 years; 54 men). We investigated if positive or negative affect (PA, NA) predicts the number of meaningful coincidences on the (...) following day (or vice versa). By means of a cross-lagged multilevel modelling approach (Bayesian estimation) we evaluated with which of two theoretical assumptions the data are more in line. First, if meaningful coincidences are facilitated by a broader and more flexible thinking style, PA should positively predict meaningful coincidences at the following day. However, if the experience of meaningful coincidences signifies a strategy to cope with negative feeling states, NA should predict the experience of meaningful coincidences during the following day. In favour of a more flexible thinking style, we found that PA predicted the number of perceived coincidences the following day. We did not find any effect for NA, and therefore, no evidence arguing for the coping mechanism hypothesis of meaningful coincidences. (shrink)

Psychometrically sound instruments that assess temporal dynamics of creative abilities are limited. The Ambulatory Battery of Creativity is designed to assess creative ideation performance multiple times in everyday life and was proven to capture the intra-individual dynamic of creative abilities reliably and validly. The present ambulatory study aimed to replicate and extend the psychometric evidence of the novel ABC. Sixty-nine participants worked on the ABC during a 5-day ambulatory assessment protocol. Each day, participants completed six randomly presented items of the (...) verbal and the figural ABC. Matching previous psychometric analyses, the results indicated good between-person and good within-person reliability. Furthermore, evidence for between-person and within-person validity of the ABC was obtained. Performance in the verbal and the figural ABC were interrelated and correlated with an independent measure of creative potential. The verbal ABC was further associated with openness, self-reported creative behavior, creative activities, and creative achievements, thus providing additional evidence of construct validity, especially for the verbal ABC. Finally, the verbal and the figural ABC yielded convincing within-person validity: Longer response times and higher subjective originality ratings were associated with more original ideas. This replication and extension of the ABC’s psychometric properties indicates that it enables a reliable and valid assessment of moment-to-moment fluctuations of creative ideation abilities in everyday life, which may facilitate the investigation of exciting new research questions related to dynamic aspects of creative ability. (shrink)

Wynn's claims are, in principle, entirely reasonable; although, as always, the devil is in the details. With respect to Wynn's discussion of the cultural evolution of artifactual symmetry, we provide a few more arguments for the utility of mirror symmetry and extend the enquiry into the tacit and explicit processing of natural and artifactual symmetry.

The philosophy of Edmund Husserl, by O. Becker.--The phenomenological philosophy of Edmund Husserl and contemporary criticism, by E. Fink.--The decisive phases in the development of Husserl's philosophy, by W. Biemel.--Husserl's concept of the "absolute," by R. Boehm.--Critical observations concerning Husserl's posthumous writings, by H. Wagner.--Husserl's departure from Cartesianism, by L. Landgrebe.

Wilfrid Sellars made profound and lasting contributions to nearly every area of philosophy. The aim of this collection is to highlight the continuing importance of Sellars’ work to contemporary debates. The contributors include several luminaries in Sellars scholarship, as well as members of the new generation whose work demonstrates the lasting power of Sellars’ ideas. Papers by O’Shea and Koons develop Sellars’ underexplored views concerning ethics, practical reasoning, and free will, with an emphasis on his longstanding engagement with Kant. Sachs, (...) Hicks and Pereplyotchik relate Sellars’ views of mental phenomena to current topics in cognitive science and philosophy of mind. Fink, deVries, Price, Macbeth, Christias, and Brandom grapple with traditional Sellarsian themes, including meaning, truth, existence, and objectivity. Brandhoff provides an original account of the evolution of Sellars’ philosophy of language and his project of "pure pragmatics". The volume concludes with an author-meets-critics section centered around Robert Brandom’s recent book, From Empiricism to Expressivism: Brandom Reads Sellars, with original commentaries and replies. (shrink)

The other Hölderlin, an unheroic, unprophetic, un-German, in a word: a poor Hölderlin, might have played an essential role in the development of Eugen Fink’s experienceable ontology as an/other form of idealism. Understood cosmologically as a “quarrel” or “game” between heaven and earth, it is designed to realize Husserl’s term “Weltbewusstseinsleben” as illustrated by Fink’s remark: “Coexistence in cognition is at the same time a testimony to the heavenly spirit.” Thus, a twofold question arises: If, in cognition, coexistence is at (...) the same time a testimony to the heavenly spirit, what is it outside of cognition, if anything? And how does it come to cognition? Reading Fink and Hölderlin together, I suggest the following answers: 1. In cognition, coexistence is at the same time a testimony to the “heavenly”, that is to say: higher, i.e. communal spirit, precisely because 2. it is nothing outside of cognition–nothing but the cosmological laceration of man, the openness of human beings to the world, about which 3. nothing more can be said than that it has always already been there for us to know, for it is being brought to our cognition time and again: through poetry. (shrink)

Seventeen scholars have contributed to this Festschrift presented to Eugen Fink, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Freiburg/br., on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. The essays are not intended to be "exemplary," but rather to express a community of thought; a participation of philosophers in the common task of defining significant problems for their discipline. A considerable number of the essays are thematically oriented around the works of Plato; the problems arising from his dialogues are approached from epistemological, (...) ontological and hermeneutic standpoints. Other topics include: the phenomenology of the human body viewed in its relation to the general concept of matter, pedagogics as a concern of the humanistic scholar in the light of Wilhelm Dilthey's philosophy and its continuation in his pupils, power viewed as a phenomenon, the dramas of Georg Büchner, philosophy East and West and the relation of history to tradition. A bibliography of the works of Eugen Fink and of books and essays on his works is also appended.—R. P. J. (shrink)

This paper examines Moore’s account of Husserl in chapter 17 of The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics. I consider in particular the threat of a gap between natural sense-making, which takes place within what Husserl calls the “natural attitude,” and phenomenological sense-making, which is made from within the perspective afforded by the phenomenological reduction. Moore’s concerns are an echo, I suggest, of the radical account of Husserlian phenomenology developed by Husserl’s student and final assistant, Eugen Fink, in his Sixth Cartesian Meditation. (...) Fink’s account shows just how wide a gap there is between natural and phenomenological sense-making. Given that gap, I argue that it is not clear whether phenomenological sense-making really can make sense of natural or ordinary sense-making, nor is it clear that we can even make sense of that kind of sense-making at all. (shrink)

Mohanty, J.N. Understanding Husserl's transcendental phenomenology.--Fink, E. The problem of the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. Operative concepts in Husserl's phenomenology.--Funke, G. A transcendental-phenomenological investigation concerning universal idealism, intentional analysis, and the genesis of habitus: archē, phansis, hexis, logos.--Pentzopoulou-Valalas, T. Reflections on the foundation of the relation between the a priori and the eidos in the phenomenology of Husserl.--Landgrebe, L. Regions of being and regional ontologies in Husserl's phenomenology. The problem posed by the transcendental science of the a priori of the (...) life world.--Wahl, J. Notes on the first part of Experience and judgment by Husserl.--Landgrebe, L. A letter from Ludwig Landgrebe to Jean Wahl.-- Wahl, J. A note on some empiricist aspects of the thought of Husserl.--Toulemont, R. The specific character of the social according to Husserl. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:What I Think about When I Think about Teaching Ethics: A Philosophical Exploration in Pedagogy1Douglas R. HochstetlerIntroductionIn his book, Philosophy Americana, Anderson outlines the basic tenets of those individuals in American philosophy known as pragmatists. The pragmatists “were not Enlightenment believers in the inevitability of progress,” Anderson writes, “but across the board the pragmatists were meliorists. They believed that inquiry and experiment could lead to the betterment of human (...) existence” (Philosophy Americana 28). Similarly, college professors seem to understand that progress is not inevitable in the classroom either. In fact, some of the most skeptical academics may even contend that students’ academic skills are deteriorating over time rather than improving (they may place the blame on high schools for poor preparation here). Rather than progress as a given, most faculty believe that their own inquiry and experimentation in the classroom may prove as fertile ground for the learning process. At their best and most impactful, they embody this pragmatic notion of meliorism, hopeful that their efforts will make a difference in the lives of their students.The American philosophical tradition encapsulates a variety of philosophical themes. Several stand out as ones that intersect with and potentially inform higher education pedagogy. In this introduction, I briefly highlight American philosophical themes related to the practice of teaching and learning. I follow this with the journal portion, with entries from a semester-long habit of recording my thoughts and observations related to pedagogy. The paper ends with reflections on the journal process itself.One theme pertinent to this topic is the aforementioned notion of meliorism. The pragmatists, in particular, held an underlying hope that life could improve with a requisite amount of effort and planning. As Anderson puts it, this hopeful stance toward meliorism permeated “Dewey’s faith in [End Page 81] education, and James’ faith in the human spirit” (Philosophy Americana 29). The idea of growth and continual improvement holds intuitive promise, but requires a foundational approach in terms of what it means for teachers and students. For example, as educators, we need clarity around our intended aims in the classroom. In his book, Experience and Education, Dewey provides a partial answer, with attention to the student experience: the “good aim... [forms] a tentative plan of treatment, keeps the plan constantly in view and yet modifies it as conditions develop. The aim, in short, is experimental, and hence constantly growing as it is tested in action” (Dewey 105).While growth and a belief in meliorism involve a sense of gradual improvement and sense of progress, it is clear that growth, especially, is not always a linear process. Marathon runners provide a clear example here. In their training regimens, the goal is to successfully finish a 26.2 mile race, perhaps within a pre-determined time. To meet the designated fitness levels required to run for this distance, it is quite typical for runners to follow twelve- or sixteen- or eighteen-week training programs. These programs provide the runners with a plan to gradually increase endurance capacity, in other words, to grow in physiological and psychological health. While these plans gradually increase the mileage per week, they are not merely linear in nature. Rather, after incremental increases in weekly mileage—say from 28 to 30 to 32 miles per week, it is recommended that the runner then follow with a “step back” or “rest” week, perhaps at 25 miles per week. In this way, the body has an opportunity to restore, thus allowing the runner to continue with this growth pattern and increased fitness the following week.In addition to meliorism, Henry David Thoreau articulated another theme related to pedagogy. Reflecting on his time at Walden Pond, he observed, “how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves” (Thoreau, Portable Thoreau 459). Too often, tradition and conformity serve as barriers to growth and meliorism; this impacts teachers and students, and classes may become repetitive, stale, and boring. Examples of conformity occur in the sense of choosing class texts or rigidly adhering to lesson or curricular plans that someone else created. Part of the job of educators is to balance this tendency... (shrink)

R. S. Peters, C. A. Mace; VII—Emotions and the Category of Passivity, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 62, Issue 1, 1 June 1962, Pages 117–142, h.

This article addresses whether Nietzsche’s naturalism is best understood as exemplifying the principles of scientific method and the spirit of Enlightenment. It does so from a standpoint inspired by Eugen Fink’s contention that Nietzsche’s endorsements of “naturalism” are best read as hyperbole. The discussion engages with Enlightenment-orientated readings (by Walter Kaufmann, Maudemarie Clark, and Brian Leiter), which hold Nietzsche’s naturalism to endorse of the spirit of empirical science, and an alternative view (provided by Richard Schacht and Wolfgang Müller-Lauter), which holds (...) Nietzsche’s “extended naturalism” to be an informing ethos of historically aware thought rather than a mere “method.” The ensuing discussion endorses the latter approach in terms that seek to take more seriously the implications of Fink’s point about the hyperbolic and figural aspects of Nietzsche’s naturalism. I argue that Nietzsche’s naturalism is indeed often hyperbolic and figural but that this exaggerated form of naturalizing thought allows insights that invite explicit theorization. Turning to an approach suggested by Adorno and Horkheimer, I argue that Nietzsche’s exaggeratedly “naturalistic” take on morality is best appreciated as a form of disturbing and disruptive political intervention in the dominant discourse of modernity in which it overtly situates itself, namely, the instrumentalizing, methodologically fixated liberal discourse of scientific Enlightenment. If we approach his thinking in this way, Nietzsche’s naturalism serves as a valuable resource for critical reflection on the hegemony of contemporary scientific culture. The context for such critical reflection is provided by Giorgio Agamben’s work on sovereign power and modernity. Nietzsche’s naturalism, I argue, is foremost biopolitical in its implications. These implications invite critical reflection on aspects of Agamben’s work; they also, following Agamben’s lead, suggest that we must step beyond the fundamental concepts of liberalism. (shrink)

Ronald Dworkin's theory of law forges a close connection between questions about the truth of propositions of law and the question of political obligation: law as integrity is a theory of legal practice that purports to explain, not only how the content of law is determined, but also why the law—in ordinary cases—imposes an obligation of obedience. The theory (as presented) is ultimately incoherent. If we accept Dworkin's theory of the grounds of law we are obliged to reject his claims (...) about its force; alternatively, if we accept his view of the force of law, we must reject his theory about its grounds: he cannot be correct about both force and grounds. Dworkin supposes that, in extraordinary cases, the force of law is cancelled or overridden; but the relevant considerations of justice are wholly internal to our identification of the content of law. Consistently elaborated, integrity denies the offending requirements legal status: lex injusta non est lex. (shrink)