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. (shrink)

Ordinary language makes a distinction between knowing a person by having seen her before and knowing her “personally,” that is, by having interacted with her. The aim of my paper is to substantiate this distinction between knowledge by interaction and knowledge by acquaintance, that is, knowledge acquired by way of the senses. According to my view, knowledge of a person by interaction is the kind of knowledge sustained by addressing her as “you.” I claim that this second-person knowledge is essentially (...) of the same form as first-person knowledge, which is knowledge sustained by the capacity to use the first-person pronoun, “I.” Both are species of what I will call, in a Kantian manner of speaking, knowledge from spontaneity. In knowing each other as “you” and “I,” two persons united in a second-personal interaction are and spontaneously know each other as the joint subject of their act. Hence knowledge by interaction—the kind of knowledge which grounds the everyday conception of knowing someone “personally”—is necessarily shared. To say that A knows B in this manner implies—in fact, it is the same thing as saying—that B knows A, it is to say that A and B know each other. This is what constitutes knowledge by interaction as a sui generis kind of knowledge of persons. (shrink)

In a series of intriguing and far-reaching papers, Hannah Ginsborg introduced the notion of “primitive normativity” as the cornerstone of a novel account of the normativity of concepts, thought, and meaning. Her account is supposed to steer a middle course between what she regards as the two horns of a dilemma first laid out by Saul Kripke in his seminal reading of Wittgenstein’s discussion of rule-following. I propose to investigate Ginsborg’s conception. I begin by establishing the conceptual relations between the (...) notions of having concepts and of following rules, between concepts and normativity, in Section 7.1. I outline the Kripkean dilemma in Section 7.2 and derive from it, in Section 7.3, a criterion of adequacy for any philosophical account purporting to explain what it is to have concepts in terms of normativity. I go on to explain Ginsborg’s notion of primitive normativity and how it is supposed to meet the criterion of adequacy. In Sections 7.4 and 7.5, I introduce and evaluate two core claims of her position and argue that each of them leads her account to founder on its own criterion of adequacy. Thus I conclude that the notion of primitive normativity offers no viable escape from the Kripkean dilemma. (shrink)

A collection of essays by German philosophers on the question of the dispensability or indispensability of language for human capacities of thought, perception, and agency.

Eine Ko-Publikation von The Hebrew University Magnes Press and De Gruyter.

This paper examines a deeply engrained intuition according to which the relation between concepts and perception is deeply problematic, because - so the intuition goes - our conceptual capacities are constitutively unable to match our perceptual capacities in fineness of grain. After some introductory remarks concerning the concept of a concept , I present the intuition and articulate the argument from fineness of grain that the intuition embodies . I go on to sketch the conception of a specific type of (...) concept - a phenomenal concept - which is meant to show that the intuition is groundless, since our conceptual capacities are in a sense just as finely-grained as our perceptual capacities . I defend the conception against two arguments that purport to show that the putative phenomenal concepts would not be concepts at all, since they fail to accord with two necessary conditions on concepts, namely the generality constraint and the shareability constraint . I argue that phenomenal concepts on my conception satisfy both conditions. (shrink)

Robert Brandom defends the intelligibility of the notion of a fully discursive practice that does not include any kind of logical vocabulary. Logical vocabulary, according to his account, should be understood as an optional extra to discursive practice, not as a necessary ingredient. Call this the Layer Cake Picture of the relation of logical to non-logical discursive practices. The aim pursued in this paper is to show, by way of an internal critique, that the Layer Cake Picture is in fact (...) incompatible with the most central claims of Brandom’s philosophy. A way is sketched how to give up the Layer Cake Picture and still hold on to a position that is central to Brandom’s philosophical outlook, namely his expressivism about logic. (shrink)

This book collects essays from the 2006 and 2007 International Philosophy Colloquia Evian, centred around a central problem in the philosophy of mind: the relationship between the human faculty of sensory experience and the faculty of conceptual reflection, that is self-consciousness. Containing articles by philosophers of eight nationalities, in three languages (English, French, German), and of "analytical" as well as "continental" provenance, it beautifully represents the spirit of the colloquia. Authors include Joshua Andresen (AU Beirut), Valérie Aucouturier (Kent U / (...) U Paris I), Karin de Boer (KU Leuven), Santiago Echeverri (U Genève), Roberto Farneti (LU Bolzano), Tim Henning (JLU Giessen), Felix Koch (Columbia U), Christophe Laudou (Madrid), David Lauer (FU Berlin), Jason Leddington (Bucknell U), Nicolas Monseu (UC Louvain), Soraya Nour (HU Berlin), Hans Bernhard Schmid (U Wien), Henning Tegtmeyer (U Leipzig). (shrink)

This paper (in German) uses Wittgenstein's concept of seeing aspects to understand the peculiarities of anamorphotic art. I aim to show that Wittgenstein's conception of aspect perception includes the idea of conceptual capacities as well as of bodily techniques and hence bridges the supposed divide between receptivity and spontaneity. A comparison is suggested with some aspects of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of perception.

This is a review article on John McDowell's philosophical papers collected in "Having the World in View" and "The Engaged Intellect", both from Harvard UP, 2008.

John McDowell’s Mind and World takes us on a philosophical journey leading from the concept of experience to the concept of tradition. It also traces a conceptual path from a Kantian to a Gadamerian problematic. In this paper, it is argued that a final step is missing in order to complete the conceptual arc of Mind and World and make the book come full circle: The Kantian conception of experience articulated on the first pages of of the book needs to (...) be integrated into the hermeneutic framework articulated on its last pages, transforming it into a more encompassing, fully hermeneutic conception. This can be achieved, I contend, by drawing on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s conception of experience in Truth and Method. I show that Gadamer’s conception of “dialectical experience” conceives of experience as an event, a process unfolding in time, and as inextricably intertwined with the notions of tradition and critique. Explaining this conception, I claim that it gives us reason to revise McDowell’s Kantian conception of experience as „openness to the world“ in an important respect: We should not understand openness to the world as unproblematically and transcendentally given, but as an inherently self-critical event unfolding in time, too. (shrink)

According to Donald Davidson and other philosophers who wish to avoid what Sellars called the Myth of the Given (like Brandom and Rorty), the relation between the deliverances of our senses and our conceptual capacities is not foundational (justificatory), but merely causal. In Mind and World, John McDowell criticizes Davidson for this view and maintains that this kind of coherentism makes it impossible to understand the intentionality of thought and language. However, many critics have complained that they cannot find an (...) argument for this claim in Mind and World. This paper (in German) aims to reconstruct such an argument out of McDowellian materials laid out in a series of critical articles devoted to Brandom's version of the coherentist picture. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a detailed critical reading of Robert Brandom’s project to give an expressive bootstrapping account of intentionality, cashed out as a normative-phenomenalist account of what I will call genuine normativity. I claim that there is a reading of Making It Explicit that evades the predominant charges of either reductionism or circularity. However, making sense of Brandom’s book in the way proposed here involves correcting Brandom’s own general account of what he is doing in it, and thus (...) presenting the argumentative structure of Making It Explicit in a new light. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer a detailed critical reading of Robert Brandom’s project to give an expressive bootstrapping account of intentionality, cashed out as a normativephenomenalist account of what I will call genuine normativity. I claim that there is a reading of Making It Explicit that evades the predominant charges of either reductionism or circularity. However, making sense of Brandom’s book in the way proposed here involves correcting Brandom’s own general account of what he is doing in it, and thus (...) presenting the argumentative structure of Making It Explicit in a new light. (shrink)

This book attempts to give a systematic account of the development of semantic holism within the philosophy of language in the 20th century. One of the things that might make it interesting is that it covers philosophers from the analytic tradition (Hilbert, Schlick, Sellars, Davidson, McDowell) as well as structuralist and post-structuralist philosophers (Saussure, Jakobson, Hjelmslev, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida). It is not only claimed that these philosophers address what can intelligibly be recognized as the same systematic questions concerning the constitution of (...) linguistic meaning, but also that the development of holistic approaches in the two traditions follows the same course, leading from formalist to post-formalist varieties of holism. This course implies the rejection of the myth of a pure or autonomous structure of language in favour of a view of language which sees linguistic practice as necessarily interwoven with the natural and social world. (shrink)

In his collection of articles, "Where Are We Now - The Epidemic as Politics", Giorgio Agamben appears to make some very startling (if not downright outrageous) claims concerning the political situation in Italy and elsewhere in Europe during the Covid-19 pandemic. In this piece [in German] I analyse how these claims are rooted in the philosophy of Agamben's "Homo sacer" project. Focussing on three central notions (Schmitt's "state of exception", Foucault's "biopolitics", and Agamben's very own "bare life"), I show how (...) Agamben's illegitimate identification of the bare life with the subject of biopolitics leads to the derailment of his theory as well as to some of the grave political misjudgments he makes regarding the pandemic. (shrink)

This paper (in German) is a contribution to the ongoing engagement of phenomenological authors with John McDowell's philosophy of perception (most prominent in the so-called Dreyfus-McDowell-Debate). First, I argue that McDowell and Merleau-Ponty share a common topic (the intentionality of perception), a common question (how is it possible?), a common position in the debate (neither empiricism nor intellectualism provide satisfactory answers to the question), and a common conviction (no epistemic intermediaries must be allowed in accounting for perceptual openness to the (...) world). However, Merleau-Ponty thinks that in order to understand openness to the world, we must understand perception as necessarily embodied, whereas McDowell thinks that we must understand it as necessarily conceptual. I call these approaches the embodiment claim and the conceptuality claim, respectively. I outline four elements of the embodiment claim which lead many phenomenologically oriented authors to suppose that it is incompatible with the conceptuality claim. I then go on to show, drawing on McDowell's writings, that the supposition is unwarranted in all four cases. I conclude that the embodiment claim and the conceptuality claim are compatible, they can be combined. I end by giving some rough hints why I think that they should, in fact must be combined in order to give a satisfactory account of perception. This will be the topic of another paper. (shrink)

This paper (in German) discusses the question of what is going on when large language models (LLMs) produce meaningful text in reaction to human prompts. Can LLMs be understood as authors or producers of speech acts? I argue that this question has to be answered in the negative, for two reasons. First, due to their lack of semantic understanding, LLMs do not understand what they are saying and hence literally do not know what they are (linguistically) doing. Since the agent’s (...) knowing what they are doing is a necessary condition of action, LLMs cannot be said to produce speech acts. Secondly, agency conceptually implies accepting accountability for one’s doings, which in turn implies some kind of practical commitment to live up to that accountability. Since LLMs lack any kind of practical commitment, they cannot be said to produce speech acts. I then assess two proposals of how better to understand the contribution of LLMs to human discourse. According to Anna Strasser and Eric Schwitzgebel, they should be understood as junior partners in asymmetric joint action. I claim that this suggestion founders on the same objections as rehearsed above. According to Alice Helliwell, they should be understood as a radically new kind of component of our (human) extended mind. Although I do have reservations about this suggestion as well, it seems the most promising at this point. (shrink)

This paper (in German) lays out two different conceptions of language as 'Spiel', which I call - appropriating a pair of expressions used by Wilhelm von Humboldt - 'Spiel' as 'ergon' and 'Spiel' as 'energeia'. The first one conceives of 'Spiel' as 'game', an abstract entity constituted by a set of rules; the second one conceives of 'Spiel' as 'play', a mode of being that is constituted by a certain kind of movement. I show how the metaphor of language as (...) 'Spiel' has been interpreted in both of these ways, but how, and why, historically, the first interpretation, specifying linguistic entities as rule-constituted entities of a certain kind, came to be superseded by the second interpretation, specifying 'play' as the mode of being of language itself, most prominently in the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Jacques Derrida. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie Jahrgang: 67 Heft: 2 Seiten: 307-312.

This article (in German) presents a sustained critique of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht's conceptual dichotomy of linguistic meaning and bodily or perceptual presence (as developed in his "Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey" and other writings). It is argued that Gumbrecht's fear of a "loss of presence" in contemporary philosophical reflection is based on a certain formalist-structuralist view of language that is, although predominant in some quarters during the 20th century, ultimately untenable. The right way to make room for a (...) contemplation of presence in Gumbrecht's sense is not to accept this mistaken view of language and then introduce presence as language's other, but rather to follow philosophers like Gadamer, later Wittgenstein, and McDowell in developing a post-formalist view of embodied language, according to which perceptual presence is essentially meaningful and linguistic meaning is essentially phenomenologically present. (shrink)

This article (in German) develops the outlines of a Wittgensteinian philosophy of the proper name. It goes beyond standard analytical treatments of proper names as referential devices in asking what kind of role the proper name of a person has for that person's identity. Hence, proper names are discussed in their relations with the capacity of saying "I", with the capacity of addressing persons as persons (or saying "you"), and with the general role words play for a person's symbolic identity. (...) It is thereby made clear in which ways people's names can matter to themselves or to other people, and how this makes persons vulnerable to specific kinds of violence through words. (The article appeared in a collection on the topic of language and violence.). (shrink)

Le présent livre a pour objet la "renaissance du pragmatisme" dans la philosophie contemporaine, qu'il tente d'éclairer en analysant les relations systématiques entre le concept de pratique et celui d'intersubjectivité. Il est le résultat de l'effort collectif de chercheurs issus de plusieurs pays, formés dans des traditions philosophiques différentes, et désireux de surmonter par le dialogue l'opposition entre philosophie anglo-américaine et philosophie continentale..

Les diverses formes de vie en commun appellent des modalités de reconnaissance très différentes. Mais il s'agit toujours de combats pour une insertion sociale réussie. Voici une tentative de déclinaison de la nature sociale de l'homme de façon à saisir les grammaires de l'humain comme les grammaires de la reconnaissance. Plusieurs articles en allemand et en anglais.

When I was first studying Hegel I encountered quite divergent readings of his views on religion. The teacher who first presented Hegel to me was a Jesuit, Quentin Lauer at Fordham University, who read Hegel as a Christian theologian providing a better metaphysical system for understanding the doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation. When I studied at Yale, Kenley Dove read Hegel as the first thoroughly atheistic philosopher, who presented the conditions of thought without reference to any foundational absolute (...) being. Meanwhile, also at Yale, John Findlay read us a deeply Neo-Platonic Hegel who taught about absolute forms held in a cosmic mind. In giving my own reading I want to talk about the ways Hegel redefines both metaphysics and religion. I would like to approach these issues by way of the medieval controversy over double truth, which was a previous conflict between religion and science. (shrink)

Because a title such as the one I have assigned to this contribution could either prompt all sorts of expectations or lead to forming no expectations at all, it seems important at the outset to begin by indicating what I shall not be concerned with. On the face of it the title could seem to call for a discussion of the way religious consciousness is expressed in the framework of this or that particular rational system or culture, presumably contemporary—be it (...) Hispanic, African, American Indian, Asiatic, European, or whatever. There can be no question that such a discussion would be significant, involving as it does the important contemporary concept of “acculturation,” which seeks to obviate the unfortunate identification of religion and any particular cultural or rational form of its expression. I shall not, in fact, be concerned with any particular culture or system at all, while, on the other hand, from the religious point of view I shall, like Hegel, be concerned only with Christianity, not as particular but as universal; not as a one among many but as all-embracing religious awareness. (shrink)

Various U.S. laws, such as the Clean Air Act and the Food Quality Protection Act, require additional protections for susceptible subpopulations who face greater environmental health risks. The main ethical rationale for providing these protections is to ensure that environmental health risks are distributed fairly. In this article, we (1) consider how several influential theories of justice deal with issues related to the distribution of environmental health risks; (2) show that these theories often fail to provide specific guidance concerning policy (...) choices; and (3) argue that an approach to public decision making known as accountability for reasonableness can complement theories of justice in establishing acceptable environmental health risks for the general population and susceptible subpopulations. Since accountability for reasonableness focuses on the fairness of the decision-making process, not the outcome, it does not guarantee that susceptible subpopulations will receive a maximum level of protection, regardless of costs or other morally relevant considerations. (shrink)

In both radical and mainstream environmental discourses, anthropocentrism (human centredness) is inextricably linked to modern industrial society's drive to control and dominate nature and the generation of our current environmental crisis. Such environmental discourses frequently argue for a retreat from anthropocentrism and the establishment of a harmonious relationship with nature, often invoking the supposed ecological harmony of indigenous peoples and/or other small-scale societies. In particular, the beliefs and values of these societies vis-à-vis their natural environment are taken to be instrumental (...) in their low environmental impact. Here it is argued that, aside from the empirically problematic nature of such claims, the beliefs of small-scale societies have been seen through an ethnocentric discursive framework which bifurcates belief systems into anthropocentric and ecocentric. Taking a meta-theoretical approach informed by Strong Structuration Theory, it is argued that the beliefs of small-scale societies about their relationship with nature should be recognised as lying on a continuum of anthropocentrism and understood in the context of their attempts to establish ‘environmental ontological security’ in the face of natural uncertainty. (shrink)

The singularity hypothesis is a radical hypothesis about the future of artificial intelligence on which self-improving artificial agents will quickly become orders of magnitude more intelligent than the average human. Despite the ambitiousness of its claims, the singularity hypothesis has been defended at length by leading philosophers and artificial intelligence researchers. In this paper, I argue that the singularity hypothesis rests on scientifically implausible growth assumptions. I show how leading philosophical defenses of the singularity hypothesis (Chalmers 2010, Bostrom 2014) fail (...) to overcome the case for skepticism. I conclude by drawing out philosophical implications of this discussion for our understanding of consciousness, personal identity, digital minds, existential risk, and ethical longtermism. GPI Working Paper No . 19-2022. (shrink)

De l'Ethique à Nicomaque au Principe Responsabilité de Hans Jonas, les fins de l'homme - notamment la réalisation parfaite de soi, pour chaque être, l'humanité de l'homme, l'humanité raisonnable dans ses formes les plus achevées - s'instruisent universellement, selon l'espace public et politique des Etats, de ces catégories fondamentales de l'existence. La triade philosophie-démocratie-progrès débouche sur la thèse principale de Platon selon laquelle, l'Etat est injuste et il faut le réformer. Si Platon considère la vie terrestre comme une prison, sa (...) théorie de la participation, conduit au pluralisme des idées, au dialogue, à l'esprit de tolérance, à la paix perpétuelle, dit Kant, condition de la réalisation de la République et d'accomplissement de la démocratie dans un progrès allant inéluctablement à l'infini. Justice, liberté, dignité, égalité et nécessité d'un vouloir-vivre-ensemble se dégagent de cet ouvrage, mais avec le constat sévère d'une mimésis négro-africaine destructurante. Toute autocratie ne peut s'éterniser puisque la liberté est immanente à l'homme. Les textes présentés ici ont pour ambition de réinterroger le socle philosophique de l'éthique et de la politique, de tenter d'en dégager le sens, la finalité et d'en souligner l'actualité en ce début du XXIe siècle. (shrink)

Interpretation -- Introduction -- Interpreting Plato -- The political culture of Plato's early dialogues -- Dialogue -- Character and history -- The mouthpiece principle -- Forms of evidence -- Desire -- Socrates and eros -- The subjectivist conception of desire -- Instrumental and terminal desire -- Rational and irrational desires -- Desire in the critique of Akrasia -- Interpreting Lysis -- The deficiency conception of desire -- Inauthentic friendship -- Platonic desire -- Antiphilosophical desires -- Knowledge -- Excellence as wisdom (...) -- The epistemic unity of excellence -- Dunamis and technê -- Goodness and form -- The epistemological priority of definitional knowledge -- Ordinary ethical knowledge -- Method -- The Socratic fallacy -- Socrates' pursuit of definitions -- Hupothesis -- Two postulates -- The geometrical illustration -- Geometrical analysis -- The method of reasoning from a postulate -- Elenchus and hupothesis -- Knowledge and aitia -- F-conditions -- Cognitive security -- Aporia -- Forms of aporia -- Dramatic aporia -- The example of Charmides -- Charmides as autobiography -- The politics of Sôphrosunê -- Critias' Philotimia -- Self-knowledge and the knowledge of knowledge -- Knowledge of knowledge and knowledge of the good -- Philosophy and the polis. (shrink)

The philosophical literature that tackles foundational questions about normativity often appeals to normative reasons—or considerations that count in favor of or against actions—and their interaction. The interaction between normative reasons is usually made sense of by appealing to the metaphor of (normative) weight scales. This paper substitutes an argumentation-theoretic model for this metaphor. The upshot is a general and precise model that is faithful to the philosophical ideas.

An introduction to ethical reasoning -- Comparative religious perspectives on war -- Just and unjust war in Shakespeare's Henry V -- Anticipating and preventing atrocities in war -- The CIA's original "social contract" -- The KGB: CIA's traditional adversary -- Espionage -- Covert action -- Interrogation -- Concluding reflections.

Carl Vogt’s quarrel with Rudolph Wagner is considered to be a culmination of the materialism dispute in the 19th century. Out of this basically academic issue on the nature of human mental functions, a personal dispute quickly developed which was unrivalled in thematic incisiveness and expression. The aim of this study is the detailed linguistic analysis of the polemics and argumentation in this dispute based on extensive text excerpts, in which for the first time detailed linguistic studies on Vogt and (...) Wagner are presented. (shrink)

Consciousness and Mind presents David Rosenthal's influential work on the nature of consciousness. Central to that work is Rosenthal's higher-order-thought theory of consciousness, according to which a sensation, thought, or other mental state is conscious if one has a higher-order thought that one is in that state. The first four essays develop various aspects of that theory. The next three essays present Rosenthal's homomorphism theory of mental qualities and qualitative consciousness, and show how that theory fits with and helps (...) sustain the HOT theory. A crucial feature of homomorphism theory is that it individuates and taxonomizes mental qualities independently of the way we're conscious of them, and indeed independently of our being conscious of them at all. So the theory accommodates the qualitative character not only of conscious sensations and perceptions, but also of those which fall outside our stream of consciousness. Rosenthal argues that, because this account of mental qualities makes no appeal to consciousness, it enables us to dispel such traditional quandaries as the alleged conceivability of undetectable quality inversion, and to disarm various apparent obstacles to explaining qualitative consciousness and understanding its nature. Six further essays build on the HOT theory to explain various important features of consciousness, among them the complex connections that hold in humans between consciousness and speech, the self-interpretative aspect of consciousness, and the compelling sense we have that consciousness is unified. Two of the essays, one an extended treatment of homomorphism theory, appear here for the first time. There is also a substantive introduction, which draws out the connections between the essays and highlights their implications. (shrink)

This Introduction introduces readers to the concepts of political philosophy: authority, democracy, freedom and its limits, justice, feminism, multiculturalism, and nationality. Accessibly written and assuming no previous knowledge of the subject, it encourages the reader to think clearly and critically about the leading political questions of our time. THe book first investigates how politcial philosophy tackles basic ethical questions such as 'how should we live together in society?' It furthermore looks at political authority, discusses the reasons society needs politics in (...) the first place, explores the limitations of politics, and asks if there are areas of life that shouldn't be governed by politics. Moreover, the book explores the connections between political authority and justice, a constant theme in political philosophy, and the ways in which social justice can be used to regulate rather than destroy a market economy. In his travels through this realm, Miller covers why nations ar the natural units of government and wonders if the rise of multiculturalism and transnational co-operation will change all this, and asks in the end if we will ever see the formation of a world government. (shrink)

There is in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit a relatively brief passage at the beginning of Chapter IV, “Self-Consciousness,” which may well be one of the most difficult passages in the whole Hegelian corpus, but which is also of supreme importance for coming to grips with the movement of Hegel’s thought, not only in the Phenomenology but in the entire “system.” It is precisely the difficulty of the passage, it would seem, that explains why it has not been given by commentators (...) an attention proportionate to its significance. So much attention has been focused on the “independence of self-consciousness,” expressed in the sections on “Lordship and Bondage,” “Stoicism and Skepticism” and “The Unhappy Consciousness” — which are, it is true, important and which lend themselves most readily to extended interpretation — that not enough attention has been given to the introductory section, entitled “The Truth of the Certainty of Self,” in which are enunciated the principles which regulate the whole movement of Hegel’s thought. The section might be described as the indispensable transition from those forms of consciousness, which are merely “objective” yet try to give themselves off as authentic knowing, to what Hegel considers to be the only possible way of authenticating the objectivity of human consciousness, i.e., the self, which claims to know, progressively coming to know itself, a self-knowing which will be knowing at all only if it culminates in “absolute knowing.” Only in the light of this section will the preface be intelligible; only in its light will the whole of the Phenomenology hang together. (shrink)

A number of philosophers endorse, without argument, the view that there’s something it’s like consciously to think that p, which is distinct from what it’s like consciously to think that q. This thesis, if true, would have important consequences for philosophy of mind and cognitive science. In this paper I offer an argument for it, and attempt to induce examples of it in the reader. The argument claims it would be impossible introspectively to distinguish conscious thoughts with respect to their (...) content if there weren’t something it’s like to think them. This argument is defended against several objections. Then I use what I call “minimal pair” experiences—sentences read without and with understanding—to induce in the reader an experience of the kind I claim exists. Further objections are considered and rebutted. (shrink)

Liberal thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were alert to the political costs and human cruelties involved in European colonialism, but they also thought that European expansion held out progressive possibilities. In Progress, Pluralism, and Politics David Williams examines the colonial and anti-colonial arguments of Adam Smith, Immanuel Kant, Jeremy Bentham, and L.T. Hobhouse. Williams locates their ambivalent attitude towards European conquest and colonial rule in a set of tensions between the impact of colonialism on European states, the (...) possibilities of progress in distant and diverse places, and the relationship between universalism and cultural pluralism. In so doing he reveals some of the central ambiguities that characterize the ways that liberal thought has dealt with the reality of an illiberal world. Of particular importance are appeals to various forms of universal history, attempts to mediate between the claims of identity and the reality of difference, and the different ways of thinking about the achievement of liberal goods in other places. Pointing to key elements in still ongoing debates within liberal states about how they should relate to illiberal places, Progress, Pluralism, and Politics enriches the discussion on political thought and the relationship between liberalism and colonialism. (shrink)

This book puts forward a revisionist view of Japanese wartime thinking. It seeks to explore why Japanese intellectuals, historians and philosophers of the time insisted that Japan had to turn its back on the West and attack the United States and the British Empire. Based on a close reading of the texts written by members of the highly influential Kyoto School, and revisiting the dialogue between the Kyoto School and the German philosopher Heidegger, it argues that the work of Kyoto (...) thinkers cannot be dismissed as mere fascist propaganda, and that this work, in which race is a key theme, constitutes a reasoned case for a post-White world. The author also argues that this theme is increasingly relevant at present, as demographic changes are set to transform the political and social landscape of North America and Western Europe over the next fifty years. (shrink)

What does it mean for someone to exist? What is truth? Are we free to choose to think or act? What is consciousness? Is human cloning justifiable? These are just some of the questions philosophers have attempted to answer, striking right at the heart of what it means to be human. This important new books shows that philosophy need not be dry or intimidating. Its highly original treatment, combining philosophical analysis, historical and biographical background and thought-provoking illustrations, simultaneously informs and (...) stimulates the reader. Western Philosophy: An Illustrated Guide is structured thematically, in terms of major issues, with chapters on World, Mind and Body, Knowledge, Faith, Ethics and Aesthetics, and Society. Cutting across this organization by theme is a parallel organization that focuses on the great thinkers and their influence, as well as the schools or "-isms" to which they subscribed. A highly accessible introduction to the subject, founded upon impeccable academic scholarship, Western Philosophy: An Illustrated Guide offers life-changing perspectives on what really matters. (shrink)