This chapter outlines ways in which Wittgenstein’s opposition to scientism is manifest in his later conception of philosophy and the negative attitude he held toward his times. The chapter tries to make clear how these two areas of Wittgenstein’s thought are connected and reflect an anti-scientistic worldview he held, one intimated in Philosophical Investigations §122. -/- It is argued that the later Wittgenstein’s metaphilosophy is marked out against two scientistic claims in particular. First, the view that the scientific method is (...) superior to all other means of learning or gaining knowledge. Second, the view that scientific knowledge is superior to all other kinds of knowledge and understanding. Wittgenstein’s opposition to these claims is brought out through examining a fundamental aim of his later philosophy, producing the ‘kind of understanding which consists in “seeing connections”’ (PI §122), and his attempts to expose certain philosophical confusions. It is argued that these reflect his antiscientistic worldview. -/- Through discussion of Oswald Spengler’s influence on Wittgenstein, the chapter outlines how Wittgenstein’s opposition to scientism underwrites his negative cultural outlook and how this is connected with the anti-scientistic elements of his later philosophy discussed. The work of Ray Monk (1999; 1990) and Hans-Johann Glock (1996) is instrumental in what follows. (shrink)

Wittgenstein criticised prevailing attitudes toward the sciences. The target of his criticisms was ‘scientism’: what he described as ‘the overestimation of science’. This collection is the first study of Wittgenstein’s anti-scientism - a theme in his work that is clearly central to his thought yet strikingly neglected by the existing literature. The book explores the philosophical basis of Wittgenstein’s anti-scientism; how this anti-scientism helps us understand Wittgenstein’s philosophical aims; and how this underlies his later conception of philosophy and the kind (...) of philosophy he attacked. An outstanding team of international contributors articulate and critically assess Wittgenstein’s views on scientism and anti-scientism, making Wittgenstein and Scientism essential reading for students and scholars of Wittgenstein’s work, on topics as varied as the philosophy of mind and psychology, philosophical practice, the nature of religious belief, and the place of science in modern culture. (shrink)

A mysterious remark to Friedrich Waismann on 30 December 1929 marks the only occasion where Wittgenstein refers to both Heidegger and Kierkegaard. Yet although this has generated much controversy, little attention has been paid to the charge of nonsense that Wittgenstein here appears to bring against Heidegger; thus, the supporting argument that may be latent has not been unearthed. Through analysis of this remark, Wittgenstein's arguments in the Tractatus and 'A Lecture on Ethics', and Heidegger's account of anxiety (Angst) in (...) Being and Time, I argue that we can extract an argument against the central question of Heidegger's philosophy: the question of being. To understand this, I examine the Kierkegaardian ideas employed by Wittgenstein and Heidegger and attempt to show that this argument can be partly understood in Kierkegaardian terms. I further argue that examining what Heidegger means by 'being' (Sein) shows that Wittgenstein's argument does not meet its target. (shrink)

Volume 27, Issue 1, February 2019, Page 73-102.

The dominant interpretation of the later Wittgenstein as a naturalist is that he endorses a form of liberal naturalism. This chapter argues that liberal naturalism cannot be ascribed to Wittgenstein for four reasons: first, liberal naturalism offers an ontology; second, liberal naturalism can be construed as a theory; third, Wittgenstein sometimes appears to be hostile towards science; fourth, Wittgenstein does not reject all forms of supernaturalism. It is argued that Wittgenstein’s later philosophy can nonetheless be described as ‘naturalistic’ for two (...) reasons. First, observations concerning natural facts play an important role in his method of providing surveyable representations of grammar. Second, his opposition to metaphysics and the absence of recourse to metaphysical phenomena in his philosophical investigations. While ascribing naturalism to the later Wittgenstein is misleading because of the four caveats raised, the chapter suggests that if we are to describe the later Wittgenstein as a naturalist, his position can be described as such insofar as there are the two naturalistic strands in his later philosophy, both of which are important to his method of grammatical investigation. This position is dubbed ‘grammatical naturalism’. (shrink)

The dominant interpretation of the later Wittgenstein as a naturalist is that he endorses a form of liberal naturalism. This chapter argues that liberal naturalism cannot be ascribed to Wittgenstein for four reasons: first, liberal naturalism offers an ontology; second, liberal naturalism can be construed as a theory; third, Wittgenstein sometimes appears to be hostile towards science; fourth, Wittgenstein does not reject all forms of supernaturalism. It is argued that Wittgenstein’s later philosophy can nonetheless be described as ‘naturalistic’ for two (...) reasons. First, observations concerning natural facts play an important role in his method of providing surveyable representations of grammar. Second, his opposition to metaphysics and the absence of recourse to metaphysical phenomena in his philosophical investigations. While ascribing naturalism to the later Wittgenstein is misleading because of the four caveats raised, the chapter suggests that if we are to describe the later Wittgenstein as a naturalist, his position can be described as such insofar as there are the two naturalistic strands in his later philosophy, both of which are important to his method of grammatical investigation. This position is dubbed ‘grammatical naturalism’. (shrink)

“Tell me," Wittgenstein once asked a friend, "why do people always say, it was natural for man to assume that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth was rotating?" His friend replied, "Well, obviously because it just looks as though the Sun is going round the Earth." Wittgenstein replied, "Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?” What would it have looked like if we looked at all (...) sciences from the viewpoint of Wittgenstein’s philosophy? Wittgenstein is undoubtedly one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. His complex body of work has been analysed by numerous scholars, from mathematicians and physicists, to philosophers, linguists, and beyond. This volume brings together some of his central perspectives as applied to the modern sciences and studies the influence they may have on the thought processes underlying science and on the world view it engenders. The contributions stem from leading scholars in philosophy, mathematics, physics, economics, psychology and human sciences; all of them have written in an accessible style that demands little specialist knowledge, whilst clearly portraying and discussing the deep issues at hand. (shrink)

Recently, Jonathan Bennett has said some interesting, but mistaken, things about certain themes in Berkeley's philosophy. His comments are interesting because they direct us to a careful scrutiny of Berkeley's arguments and methodology in the often neglected Draft to the Introduction to the Principles, and mistaken because Bennett misinterprets these arguments and methodology. I would like to correct those mistakes because an understanding of Berkeley's Draft is helpful in interpreting the Introduction, which in turn is important for our understanding (...) of not only his philosophical methodology, but also for an adequate interpretation of some of his substantive philosophical claims. I will argue that Bennett misinterprets Berkeley's deleted comments and arguments concerned with two Lockean themes, classification and understanding, as presented in several passages from the Draft which did not appear in the published Introduction to the Principles. In both cases Bennett's confusion is a failure to grasp Berkeley's strategy and target in his attacks upon Locke and the theses he takes Locke to hold. Read in their unedited form the deleted passages not only indicate that Bennett misinterprets them, but they also are suggestive of some interesting philosophical comments on Berkeley's part. (shrink)

How should one understand knowledge-wh ascriptions? That is, how should one understand claims such as ‘‘I know where the car is parked,’’ which feature an interrogative complement? The received view is that knowledge-wh reduces to knowledge that p, where p happens to be the answer to the question Q denoted by the wh-clause. I will argue that knowledge-wh includes the question—to know-wh is to know that p, as the answer to Q. I will then argue that knowledge-that includes a contextually (...) implicit question. I will conclude that knowledge is a question-relative state. Knowing is knowing the answer, and whether one knows the answer depends (in part) on the question. (shrink)

Discovering someone disagrees with you is a common occurrence. The question of epistemic significance of disagreement concerns how discovering that another disagrees with you affects the rationality of your beliefs on that topic. This book examines the answers that have been proposed to this question, and presents and defends its own answer.

In this study of events and their places in our language and thought, Bennett propounds and defends views about what kind of item an event is, how the language of events works, and about how these two themes are interrelated. He argues that most of the supposedly metaphysical literature is really about the semantics of their names, and that the true metaphysic of events--known by Leibniz and rediscovered by Kim--has not been universally accepted because it has been tarred with the (...) brush of a false semantic theory. (shrink)

Ichikawa and Jarvis offer a new rationalist theory of mental content and defend a traditional epistemology of philosophy. They argue that philosophical inquiry is continuous with non-philosophical inquiry, and can be genuinely a priori, and that intuitions do not play an important role in mental content or the a priori.

Conditional sentences are among the most intriguing and puzzling features of language, and analysis of their meaning and function has important implications for, and uses in, many areas of philosophy. Jonathan Bennett, one of the world's leading experts, distils many years' work and teaching into this Philosophical Guide to Conditionals, the fullest and most authoritative treatment of the subject. An ideal introduction for undergraduates with a philosophical grounding, it also offers a rich source of illumination and stimulation for graduate (...) students and professional philosophers. (shrink)

Davidson's account of weakness of will dependsupon a parallel that he draws between practicaland theoretical reasoning. I argue that theparallel generates a misleading picture oftheoretical reasoning. Once the misleadingpicture is corrected, I conclude that theattempt to model akratic belief on Davidson'saccount of akratic action cannot work. Thearguments that deny the possibility of akraticbelief also undermine, more generally, variousattempts to assimilate theoretical to practicalreasoning.

The boldest and most unsettling of the major early modern philosophers, Spinoza, had a much greater, if often concealed, impact on the international intellectual scene and on the early Enlightenment than philosophers, historians, and political theorists have conventionally tended to recognize. Europe-wide efforts to prevent the reading public and university students learning about Spinoza, the man and his work, in the years immediately after his death in 1677, dominated much of his early reception owing to the revolutionary implications of his (...) thought for philosophy, religion, practical ethics and lifestyle, Bible criticism, and political theory. Nevertheless, contrary to what has sometimes been maintained, his general impact was immediate, very widespread, and profound. One of the main objectives of the book is to show how early and how deeply Leibniz, Bayle, Arnauld, Henry More, Anne Conway, Richard Baxter, Robert Boyle, Henry Oldenburg, Pierre-Daniel Huet, Richard Simon, and Nicholas Steno, among many others, were affected by and led to wrestle with his principal ideas. (shrink)

Students of perception have long puzzled over a range of cases in which perception seems to tell us distinct, and in some sense conflicting, things about the world. In the cases at issue, the perceptual system is capable of responding to a single stimulus — say, as manifested in the ways in which subjects sort that stimulus — in different ways. This paper is about these puzzling cases, and about how they should be characterized and accounted for within a general (...) theory of perception. After rehearsing the sort of case at issue (§1), I’ll examine critically some of the strategies by which philosophers and perceptual psychologists have attempted to account for them (§2). Finally, I’ll present an alternative computational account of the puzzle cases, argue that this view is superior to its competitors, and examine some of its implications (§3). (shrink)

The revised edition of this highly successful text provides a clear and accessible introduction to some of the most important questions of political philosophy. Organized around major issues, Wolff provides the structure that beginners need, while also introducing some distinctive ideas of his own.

Epistemic Courage is a timely and thought-provoking exploration of the ethics of belief, which shows why epistemology is no mere academic abstraction - the question of what to believe couldn't be more urgent. Jonathan Ichikawa argues that a skeptical, negative bias about belief is connected to a conservative bias that reinforces the status quo.

" Here Jonathan Lear argues that irony is one of the tools we use to live seriously, to get the hang of becoming human.

Various scientists and philosophers have heavily criticized what they see as problematic forms of ‘nutritional reductionism’ or ‘nutritionism’ whereby studying food–health interactions at the level of isolated food components produces largely misguided science and misleading interpretations. However, the exact target of these diverse criticisms remains elusive, and its implications are overstated, which may hinder scientific understanding. To better identify the types of flaws supposedly hindering reductionist research, we disentangle three types of reductionist claims to better determine what the debate is (...) about and to propose ways to move it forward. We then present a qualified defence of the reductionist programme that hinges on the ability to identify nutritional causes that make a difference, which we illustrate through central examples in the history of nutrition. This defence is taken further by using insights from the philosophy of mechanisms to analyse how the field of nutritional ecology offers a synthetic framework to explain, generate, and test predictions about nutrient–organism interactions, which is premised on the biological mechanisms of nutrient-specific appetite regulation. The result, which we call ‘synthetic reductionism’, avoids many, though perhaps not all, of the challenges raised by anti-reductionists, and also highlights the potential of reductionism to identify nutritional difference makers. (shrink)

An examination of the philosophy of Anne Conway (1631-1679) and the main aspects of her fascinating work, Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy.

Causal claims are context sensitive. According to the old orthodoxy (Mackie 1974, Lewis 1986, inter alia), the context sensitivity of causal claims is all due to conversational pragmatics. According to the new contextualists (Hitchcock 1996, Woodward 2003, Maslen 2004, Menzies 2004, Schaffer 2005, and Hall ms), at least some of the context sensitivity of causal claims is semantic in nature. I want to discuss the prospects for causal contextualism, by asking why causal claims are context sensitive, what they are sensitive (...) to, and where they are sensitive to it. (shrink)

Questions about the ontology of color matter because colors matter. Colors are extremely pervasive and salient features of the world. Moreover, people care about the distribution of these features: they expend money and effort to paint their houses, cars, and other possessions, and their clear preference for polychromatic over monochromatic televisions and computer monitors have consigned monochromatic models to the status of rare antiques. The apparent ubiquity of colors and their importance to our lives makes them a ripe target for (...) ontological questions such as the following: " • What is the nature of colors? " • Are they, as they seem to be, properties of objects? (shrink)

How do we know what's (metaphysically) possible and impossible? Arguments from Kripke and Putnam suggest that possibility is not merely a matter of (coherent) conceivability/imaginability. For example, we can coherently imagine that Hesperus and Phosphorus are distinct objects even though they are not possibly distinct. Despite this apparent problem, we suggest, nevertheless, that imagination plays an important role in an adequate modal epistemology. When we discover what is possible or what is impossible, we generally exploit important connections between what is (...) possible and what we can coherently imagine. We can often come to knowledge of metaphysical modality a priori. (shrink)

This article gives an overview of some recent debates about the relationship between reasons and rational requirements of coherence - e.g. the requirements to be consistent in our beliefs and intentions, and to intend what we take to be the necessary means to our ends.

The flight from foundationalism in the earlier part of this century left several options in its wake. Distress over the possibility of foundationalist replies to the regress problem, coupled with consternation over the thought of circular reasoning mysteriously becoming acceptable as the circle gets large led to the attraction of holistic theories of a coherentist variety. Yet, such coherentisms seemed to leave the belief system cut off from the world, and perhaps a better idea was to abandon the approach to (...) epistemology that centered on the concepts of evidence and justificatory relations and focus instead on connections between our thoughts and the world which they are about, an idea leading to causal and reliability theories. (shrink)

I argue that “consent” language presupposes that the contemplated action is or would be at someone else’s behest. When one does something for another reason—for example, when one elects independently to do something, or when one accepts an invitation to do something—it is linguistically inappropriate to describe the actor as “consenting” to it; but it is also inappropriate to describe them as “not consenting” to it. A consequence of this idea is that “consent” is poorly suited to play its canonical (...) central role in contemporary sexual ethics. But this does not mean that nonconsensual sex can be morally permissible. Consent language, I’ll suggest, carries the conventional presupposition that that which is or might be consented to is at someone else’s behest. One implication will be a new kind of support for feminist critiques of consent theory in sexual ethics. (shrink)

The Indian Buddhist philosopher Vasubandhu is known for his critical contribution to Buddhist Abhidharma thought, his turn to the Mahayana tradition, and his concise, influential Yogacara-Vijñanavada texts. _Paving the Great Way_ reveals another dimension of his legacy: his integration of several seemingly incompatible intellectual and scriptural traditions, with far-ranging consequences for the development of Buddhist epistemology and the theorization of tantra. Most scholars read Vasubandhu's texts in isolation and separate his intellectual development into distinct phases. Featuring close studies of Vasubandhu's (...) _Abhidharmakosabhasya_, _Vyakhyayukti_, _Vimsatika_, and _Trisvabhavanirdesa_, among other works, this book identifies recurrent treatments of causality and scriptural interpretation that unify distinct strands of thought under a single, coherent Buddhist philosophy. In Vasubandhu's hands, the Buddha's rejection of the self as a false construction provides a framework through which to clarify problematic philosophical issues, such as the nature of moral agency and subjectivity under a broadly causal worldview. Recognizing this continuity of purpose across Vasubandhu's diverse corpus recasts the interests of the philosopher and his truly innovative vision, which influenced Buddhist thought for a millennium and continues to resonate with today's philosophical issues. An appendix includes extensive English-language translations of the major texts discussed. (shrink)

Conciliationism is the family of views that rationality requires agents to reduce confidence or suspend belief in p when acknowledged epistemic peers (i.e. agents who are (approximately) equally well-informed and intellectually capable) disagree about p. While Conciliationism is prima facie plausible, some have argued that Conciliationism is not an adequate theory of peer disagreement because it is self-undermining. Responses to this challenge can be put into two mutually exclusive and exhaustive groups: the Solution Responses which deny Conciliationism is self-undermining and (...) attempt to provide arguments which demonstrate this; and the Skeptical Responses which accept that Conciliationism is self-undermining but attempt to mitigate this result by arguing this is either impermanent and/or not very worrisome. I argue that, by Conciliationism’s own lights, both kinds of responses (almost certainly) fail to save Conciliationism from being self-undermining. Thus, Conciliationism is (almost certainly) permanently self-undermining. This result is significant because it demonstrates that Conciliationism is likely hopeless: there is likely nothing that can save Conciliationism from this challenge. I further argue that Conciliationism, like any view, should be abandoned if it is (almost certainly) hopeless. (shrink)

Color provides an instance of a general puzzle about how to reconcile the picture of the world given to us by our ordinary experience with the picture of the world given to us by our best theoretical accounts. The Red and the Real offers a new approach to such longstanding philosophical puzzles about what colors are and how they fit into nature. It is responsive to a broad range of constraints --- both the ordinary constraints of color experience and the (...) more theoretical constraints of color science, psychology, semantics, and ontology. (shrink)

The larger philosophical world has on the whole turned from a mix of averted gaze and outright antipathy toward x‐phi, to a mix of grudging acceptance and enthusiastic embrace. This chapter explains that the experimental philosophy is relevant, and that it is dangerous, and explains some ways that people can do more to remain both. Experimental philosophy's semi‐official sigil of the burning armchair has advertised its dangerousness for the past decade and a half as well. The chapter explains that it (...) is a threat that is every bit as potently present in positive program x‐phi as it is in negative program work. To explore the idea that experimental philosophy's positive contributions will still be primarily negative in nature, the chapter interrogates the passage from Timothy Williamson. It focuses on the wheat‐from‐chaff project of separating signal from noise in the evidence produced by intuitions and the like. (shrink)

According to some critics, traditional armchair philosophical methodology relies in an illicit way on intuitions. But the particular structure of the critique is not often carefully articulated—a significant omission, since some of the critics’ arguments for skepticism about philosophy threaten to generalize to skepticism in general. More recently, some experimentalist critics have attempted to articulate a critique that is especially tailored to affect traditional methods, without generalizing too widely. Such critiques are more reasonable, and more worthy of serious consideration, than (...) are blunter critiques that generalize far too widely. I argue that a careful (empirical!) examination of extant philosophical practices shows that traditional philosophical methods can meet these more reasonable challenges. (shrink)

D. M. Armstrong famously claims that deterministic laws of nature are contingent relations between universals and that his account can also be straightforwardly extended to irreducibly probabilistic laws of nature. For the most part, philosophers have neglected to scrutinize Armstrong’s account of probabilistic laws. This is surprising precisely because his own claims about probabilistic laws make it unclear just what he takes them to be. We offer three interpretations of what Armstrong-style probabilistic laws are, and argue that all three interpretations (...) are incompatible either with some feature of Armstrong’s broader metaphysics or with essential features of his account of laws (or both). (shrink)

Humans often attribute the things that happen to one or another actual cause. In this chapter, we survey some recent philosophical and psychological research on causal attribution. We pay special attention to the relation between graphical causal modeling and theories of causal attribution. We think that the study of causal attribution is one place where formal and experimental techniques nicely complement one another.

In Morality, the distinguished religious leader and philosopher Rabbi Jonathan Sacks diagnoses our troubled times as a period of "cultural climate change." Delivering an insightful critique of our modern condition, and assessing its roots and causes from the ancient Greeks through the Reformation and Enlightenment to the present day, Sacks argues that there is no liberty without morality, and no freedom without responsibility.

This chapter examines the ways in which the debates about the epistemic significance of disagreement are debates about the nature and impact of higher-order evidence.

The idea of public reason is at the center of John Rawls's political philosophy. Public reason is a standard by which we measure laws and political institutions. This chapter discusses the practice of public reason, the moral basis of public reason, and the challenge posed by religious critics of public reason. It provides three possible answers to the question: What is the moral basis for endorsing this particular conception of democratic politics – public reason? It is Rawlsian concept of justice (...) – the ideal of a fair system of social cooperation between free and equal citizens – which provides the moral basis for public reason. Given this basis, citizens then engage in the practice of public reason with one another. (shrink)