The concept of the sublime was crucial to the thought of Immanuel Kant, who defined it as the experience of what is great in power, size, or number. From ancient times to the present, the aesthetic experience of the sublime has been associated with morality, but if we want to be able to exclude evil, fascistic, or terroristic uses of the sublime—the inescapable awe generated by the Nuremberg rallies, for example—we require a systematic justification of the claim that there are (...) internal moral constraints on the sublime. In _Kant on Sublimity and Morality_, Joshua Rayman argues that Kant alone provides the system by which we can bind sublimity to moral ideas, the exhibition of freedom, the production of respect, and violence towards inclinations. (shrink)

Nietzsche’s critique of causality is at the heart of his critiques of metaphysics and natural science, for causality is the mechanism by which metaphysical concepts are generated and nature is transformed into a system of universal laws. Yet the nature, variety, and radical entailments of his critique of causality have been insufficiently appreciated in the scholarship. By eliminating cause, he deals a death blow to the naturalism currently in vogue in Nietzsche studies,1 according to which Nietzsche is “engaged in giving (...) causal explanations of various human phenomena.”2 The mistake is to read his metaphysically deflationary views concerning nonnatural causality and his privileging of nature and philosophical .. (shrink)

Nietzsche’s 1873 fragment, the Zeitatomenlehre, posits a temporal conception of action at a distance where space is reduced to a single point and time consists only in a series of discrete atoms. Taken as a physical doctrine that destroys all spatial difference, this conception raises serious conflicts with the rest of his work. I describe and situate this theory within the historical context of debates over action at a distance in nineteenth-century physics, distinguish it from physical theories influential on Nietzsche, (...) and argue that these conflicts can be resolved only by viewing it in the anti-metaphysical phenomenalist and representational terms that he also expressed in his early work. (shrink)

The multiple sources and functions of Heraclitus in Nietzsche’s writings should not be underestimated. Nietzsche’s early readings of Heraclitus are steeped in the Greek fragments, the doxographical tradition, and in philological scholarship. Hence, they are largely either fair interpretations of the extant fragments, clear translations of a select group of fragments into his own language, or improvisations based in part on a narrow subset of the spurious remarks set down in the doxographical tradition. Nietzsche’s later departures from this tradition articulate (...) an anti-metaphysical Heraclitus that he found in the Heraclitean fragments, which he takes to prefigure and later parrot his doctrines of becoming, the child, strife, chance, and eternal recurrence. For this reason, Nietzsche’s Heraclitus is necessarily no objective, individual historical person, but at various times and to various degrees a copy, an appropriative invention, and a personal-philological-philosophical archetype filtered through the lenses of ancient Greek understandings of how he must have lived, given what he said and what philosophy is; nineteenth-century German philological reconstructions of Heraclitean thought; and Nietzsche’s own need for such a precursor to voice his own doctrines and thereby lend them heft against the Platonic tradition of metaphysical philosophy. (shrink)

Nietzsche’s critique of causality has not been taken as seriously as it should be. Nietzschean naturalists such as Ken Gemes, Brian Leiter, and John Richardson carry on with their appeals to causal-scientific forms of explanation as if there were no such critique.1 For instance, Leiter claims that Nietzsche is a naturalist in that he sets forth “theories that explain various important human phenomena … [in scientific terms], but are also modeled on science in the sense that they seek to reveal (...) the causal determinants of these phenomena, typically in various physiological and psychological facts about persons”. But Nietzsche decisively rejects every element of this claim in many passages. For instance, he... (shrink)

Friedrich Nietzsche expresses self-refuting claims to universal skepticism not only in his early writings on language, but also in his middle and later writings. But this is not the full story, for he simultaneously propounds alternative, relativistic, contextual, imperative, perspectival, and instinctual, drive- or need-based forms of knowledge throughout his career. Here, there is no straightforward answer to the question whether Nietzsche's skeptical accounts of knowledge and truth are self-refuting, since he determines knowledge, skepticism and truth in various ways. In (...) order to assess his accounts, then, it is necessary to articulate the linguistic, epistemological and metaphysical conditions under which Nietzsche could express a non self-refuting, universal skepticism.Friedrich Nietzsche formuliert selbstwiedersprüchliche Aussagen eines universellen Skeptizismus nicht nur in den frühen Schriften über Sprach, sondern auch in den mittleren und späteren Schriften. Darüber hinaus hat er während seines gesamten Schaffens gleichzeitig auch alternative, relativistische, kontextabhängige, auslegende, perspektivische, trieb- und bedürfnisorientierte Formen des Wissens verteidigt. Folglich gibt es keine einfache Antwort auf die Frage, ob Nietzsches skeptische Erklärungen des Wissens und der Warheit selbstwiderlegend sind, da er Wissen, Skeptizmus und Warheit in unterschiedlicher Weise bestimmt. Um seine Erklärungen zu beurteilen ist es daher notwendig, die linguistischen, epistemologischen und metaphysischen Bedingungen zu artikulieren, unter denen Nietzsche einen nicht-selbstwiderlegenden, universellen Skeptizismus formulieren konnte. (shrink)

The main events of Theodor W. Adorno's American experience are so familiar that, as David Jenemann1 points out, Martin Jay's groundbreaking 1973 text, The Dialectical Imagination,2 which essentially introduced the Frankfurt School to an American audience, already describes these events as well-known. Max Horkheimer's Institut für Sozialforschung (the Institute, for short), which in its exile had been affiliated with Columbia University since 1935, arranged with the Austrian émigré sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld and the Rockefeller Foundation to bring Adorno to New York (...) in 1938 to direct the musical section of the Princeton Radio Research Project, in exchange for financial support. In…. (shrink)

The past forty years of world development have seen multiple operational frameworks, most notably, the neoliberal Washington Consensus or structural adjustment policies, the internation...

The conventional view is that analytic philosophy has dominated American philosophy departments since 1950 and that continental philosophy and pragmatism have been marginalized almost out of existence due to philosophical inferiority or McCarthyist persecution. But a precise historical treatment of transformations in the field shows that this is, in fact, the golden age of continental philosophy and pragmatist scholarship, that McCarthyism had nothing to do with pragmatism’s fall from dominance, and that the shape of the field depends more on larger (...) academic-historical trends. However, McCarthyism likely had lasting effects on analytic control of powerful qualifying institutions. (shrink)

Recently, philosophy of language has swept through the community of Hegel scholarship. Since the early 1980s, Hegel scholars, such as John McCumber, Willem De Vries, Rodney Coltman, John Russon, Frank Schalow, Irene Harvey, and Henry Sussman, have imputed to Hegel the notion that the problems of philosophy are problems of language. What these readings ignore is that theessential systematic obstacle in Hegel is representation, not language as such. Hence, any Hegelian resolution of philosophical problems involves the speculative overcoming of representation, (...) rather than the reformation of language, as is clear in the transition from “Revealed Religion” to “Absolute Knowing” in the Phenomenology. By tracing seriously the implications of the fact that the completion of revealed religion is “absolute knowing” and that the limiting form of revealed religion is representation, I will show that representation is the dominant problem throughout the Phenomenology. (shrink)

Despite Žižek’s privileging of politics over ethics, it is possible to reconstruct from his work a very significant, thoroughgoing reconception of ethics and metaethics. He sets forth accounts of the nature of ethics, action, freedom, the supreme moral principle, the fact-value split, the relation of the self to others, and the values that should determine our actions. He expresses a Kantian/Lacanian notion of law and freedom, an Hegelian critique of the subject-object distinction, a Lacanian subversion of the fact-value split, and (...) an Adornian quasi-formalist treatment of ethical imperatives. The most radical element within his ethics is arguably his notion of the passage à l’acte, according to which certain types of actions not only transgress extant norms, but challenge the very nature of the norms, transform the coordinates of the reality principle, and bring into being its conditions of value. (shrink)

Many well-known works in twentieth-century continental aesthetics, such as Martin Heidegger's “Origin of the Work of Art,” Jacques Derrida's The Truth in Painting, Michel Foucault's “Las Meninas,” and the two most influential Frankfurt School texts on aesthetics, Walter Benjamin's optimistic “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility”1 and Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer's pessimistic “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,”2 treat aesthetics as an occasion for a critique of metaphysics. Hence, it is reasonable to (...) assess these works by reference to whether they retain metaphysical categories, concepts, or methodologies. In this regard, the essays…. (shrink)

ExcerptIn 1985, a collection titled Post-Analytic Philosophy appeared (Columbia University Press). Advertised with overly optimistic blurbs from Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard, and featuring work by famous, pragmatically inclining, analytically trained philosophers such as Donald Davidson, Cornel West, Stanley Cavell, Arthur Danto, Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, Thomas Kuhn, Thomas Nagel, and John Rawls, the text announced the death of analytic philosophy at least thirty or forty years after the fact. But if Wittgenstein, Quine, and others had long ago convincingly refuted (...) many of the core doctrines of “analytic philosophy,” British empiricism, logical positivism, and logical empiricism, many American philosophers continued…. (shrink)

For Herbert Marcuse, the terrifying specter of communism at the end of the 1960s served the interests of counterrevolution in discrediting revolutionary aims and legitimizing all necessary repressive counter-measures against emancipatory programs. Slavoj Žižek adds a second function, namely, that during the Cold War the specter of communism also served to humanize Western liberal democracy, necessitating strong social welfare measures and thus forming capitalism with a human face. But with the fall of the Eastern Bloc the threat to this system (...) has become more spectral than ever, because any mild deviations from a neoliberal vision of free market capitalism now bring with them charges of totalitarianism. In the face of such formidable obstacles, Marcuse and Žižek argue that the nature and means of emancipation necessarily remain indeterminate. Hence, the emancipatory possibilities that they do sketch out remain overwhelmingly negative and spectral. This raises the question of whether a political theory ought to be sufficiently detailed as to be directly actionable. I conclude that their work largely satisfies the set of justifiable criteria for a successful political theory articulated or implied by Kant and Horkheimer, and therefore, remains highly relevant to our thinking of the political. (shrink)

Since its beginnings in 1968, Telos has repeatedly turned to the work of Theodor Adorno, asking how his version of Critical Theory could cross the Atlantic and make sense in the United States. The extraordinary attention paid since to Adorno's American experience, like that of Alexis de Tocqueville and Gunnar Myrdal, derives in part from a constant fascination with the spectacle of the critical European intellectual's encounter with the antithetical culture of a resistant America. In this classic meeting of Old (...) World and New, misunderstandings abound. Americans regard the European intellectual as biased and arrogant, spinning grotesque caricatures of America…. (shrink)

RESUMEN El pensamiento y las prácticas sociales de los atenienses de la Época Clásica se hallaban jerarquizados en favor de los varones, que se consideraban superiores naturalmente y con capacidad y derecho a gobernar en la polis y en la casa. Se muestra cómo el Agamenón de Esquilo cuestiona la naturalización de esta superioridad mediante el personaje de Clitemnestra, quien actúa, piensa y habla como varón, y muestra que matar a un familiar, cambiar de pareja, luchar por el mando se (...) justificaban si lo realizaba Agamenón. ¿Por qué se condenaban estas acciones cuando eran llevadas a cabo por Clitemnestra? ABSTRACT The thought and social practices of Athenians during the Classical period were hierarchized in favor of males, who were considered naturally superior and endowed with the capacity and right to rule the polis and the home. The article shows how Aeschylus' Agamemnon questions the naturalization of that superiority through the character of Clytemnestra, who acts, thinks, and speaks like a man, and shows that killing a family member, changing partners, and fighting for power were justified if Agamemnon did those things. Why were such actions condemned if Clytemnestra carried them out? (shrink)

The present volume provides an introduction to the major themes of work in experimental philosophy, bringing together some of the most influential articles in ...

It is well known that the nature of consciousness is elusive, and that attempts to understand it generate problems in metaphysics, philosophy of mind, psychology, and neuroscience. Less appreciated are the important – even if still elusive – connections between consciousness and issues in ethics. In this chapter we consider three such connections. First, we consider the relevance of consciousness for questions surrounding an entity’s moral status. Second, we consider the relevance of consciousness for questions surrounding moral responsibility for action. (...) Third, we consider the relevance of consciousness for the acquisition of moral knowledge. (shrink)

Consider the following explanation: (1) George took his umbrella because it was just about to rain. This is an explanation of a quite distinctive sort. It is profoundly different from the sort of explanation we might use to explain, say, the movements of a bouncing ball or the gradual rise of the tide on a beach. Unlike these other types of explanations, it explains an agent’s behavior by describing the agent’s own _reasons_ for performing that behavior. Explanations that work in (...) this way have a number of distinctive and important properties, and we will refer to them here as _reason explanations_. Looking at the use of reason explanations with a philosophical eye, one is apt to experience a certain puzzlement. One wants to know precisely what makes a given reason explanation true or false. So, for example, the explanation given above seems to be saying that George’s reason for taking his umbrella was that it was just about to rain. But what exactly makes it the case that this is George’s reason? Does he have to actually be. (shrink)

This book provides an analytical and critical appraisal of Rousseau's political thought that, while frank about its limits, also explains its enduring power.

Advocates of the use of intuitions in philosophy argue that they are treated as evidence because they are evidential. Their opponents agree that they are treated as evidence, but argue that they should not be so used, since they are the wrong kinds of things. In contrast to both, we argue that, despite appearances, intuitions are not treated as evidence in philosophy whether or not they should be. Our positive account is that intuitions are a subclass of inclinations to believe. (...) Our thesis explains why intuitions play a role in persuasion and inquiry, without conceding that they are evidential. The account also makes predictions about the structure of intuitions that are confirmed by independent arguments. (shrink)

There are several important arguments in metaethics that rely on explanatory considerations. Gilbert Harman has presented a challenge to the existence of moral facts that depends on the claim that the best explanation of our moral beliefs does not involve moral facts. The Reliability Challenge against moral realism depends on the claim that moral realism is incompatible with there being a satisfying explanation of our reliability about moral truths. The purpose of this chapter is to examine these and related arguments. (...) In particular, this chapter will discuss four kinds of arguments – Harman’s Challenge, evolutionary debunking arguments, irrelevant influence arguments, and the Reliability Challenge – understood as arguments against moral realism. The main goals of this chapter are (i) to articulate the strongest version of these arguments; (ii) to present and assess the central epistemological principles underlying these arguments; and (iii) to determine what a realist would have to do to adequately respond to these arguments. (shrink)

Our brains were designed for tribal life, for getting along with a select group of others and for fighting off everyone else. But modern times have forced the world’s tribes into a shared space, resulting in epic clashes of values along with unprecedented opportunities. As the world shrinks, the moral lines that divide us become more salient and more puzzling. We fight over everything from tax codes to gay marriage to global warming, and we wonder where, if at all, we (...) can find our common ground. (shrink)

This chapter examines when a word’s meaning can change. On the view explored here, the meaning of a term is fixed by language users having certain dispositions to use the term in certain ways. Consequently, meanings change—concepts shift—when the relevant dispositions change. After the view is articulated, it is put to use defending descriptivism from some recent objections. Finally, this chapter examines the extent to which terms really replace meanings at all—conceptual revolution—or just have their meanings and references change shape—conceptual (...) evolution. (shrink)

We think of logic as objective. We also think that we are reliable about logic. These views jointly generate a puzzle: How is it that we are reliable about logic? How is it that our logical beliefs match an objective domain of logical fact? This is an instance of a more general challenge to explain our reliability about a priori domains. In this paper, I argue that the nature of this challenge has not been properly understood. I explicate the challenge (...) both in general and for the particular case of logic. I also argue that two seemingly attractive responses – appealing to a faculty of rational insight or to the nature of concept possession – are incapable of answering the challenge. (shrink)

The correspondence theory of truth is a precise and innovative account of how the truth of a proposition depends upon that proposition's connection to a piece of reality. Joshua Rasmussen refines and defends the correspondence theory of truth, proposing new accounts of facts, propositions, and the correspondence between them. With these theories in hand, he then offers original solutions to the toughest objections facing correspondence theorists. Addressing the Problem of Funny Facts, Liar Paradoxes, and traditional epistemological questions concerning how (...) our minds can access reality, he challenges recent objections, and defends what has traditionally been the most popular theory of truth. Written with clarity, precision, and sensitivity to a range of philosophical backgrounds, his book will appeal to advanced students and scholars seeking a deeper understanding of the relationship between truth and reality. (shrink)

Are properties perfectly natural (or not) relative to worlds, or are they perfectly natural (or not) tout court? That is, could there be a property P that is instanti-ated at worlds w1 and w2, and is perfectly natural at w1 but not at w2? Here, we offer an original argument for the non-world-relativity of perfect naturalness. Along the way, we reply to a prima facie compelling argument for the contin-gency of perfect naturalness, based upon the connection between natural prop-erties and (...) laws of nature. (shrink)

We chart how neuroscience and philosophy have together advanced our understanding of moral judgment with implications for when it goes well or poorly. The field initially focused on brain areas associated with reason versus emotion in the moral evaluations of sacrificial dilemmas. But new threads of research have studied a wider range of moral evaluations and how they relate to models of brain development and learning. By weaving these threads together, we are developing a better understanding of the neurobiology of (...) moral judgment in adulthood and to some extent in childhood and adolescence. Combined with rigorous evidence from psychology and careful philosophical analysis, neuroscientific evidence can even help shed light on the extent of moral knowledge and on ways to promote healthy moral development. (shrink)

One of the most influential methodological contributions of twentieth‐century philosophy was the approach known as conceptual analysis. The majority of experimental philosophy papers are doing cognitive science. They are revealing surprising new effects and then offering explanations those effects in terms of certain underlying cognitive processes. The best way to get a sense for actual research programs in experimental philosophy is to look in detail at one particular example. This chapter considers the effect of moral considerations on intuitions about intentional (...) action, as an example. Working in conceptual analysis aimed to develop analyses of concepts, and in that context, the obvious proposal would be that people should be aiming for simple analyses of concepts. The chapter also focuses on the study of intuitions about knowledge. Experimental philosophy has sought to capture the patterns in people's intuitions through theories about underlying cognitive processes. (shrink)

This chapter discusses epistemic objections to non-naturalist moral realism. The goal of the chapter is to determine which objections are pressing and which objections can safely be dismissed. The chapter examines five families of objections: (i) one involving necessary conditions on knowledge, (ii) one involving the idea that the causal history of our moral beliefs reflects the significant impact of irrelevant influences, (iii) one relying on the idea that moral truths do not play a role in explaining our moral beliefs, (...) (iv) one involving the claim that if moral realism is true then our moral beliefs are unlikely to be reliable, and (v) one involving the claim that moral realism is incompatible with there being a plausible explanation of our reliability about morality. The overall conclusion of the chapter is that the final objection is by far the most pressing. (shrink)

Duncan Purves and Nicolas Delon have argued that one’s life will be meaningful to the extent that one contributes to valuable states of affairs and this contribution is a result of one’s intentional actions. They then argue, contrary to some theorists’ intuitions, that non-human animals are capable of fulfilling these requirements, and that this finding might entail important things for the animal ethics movement. In this paper, I also argue that things besides human beings can have meaningful existences, but I (...) disagree with Purves and Delon’s theory of meaning, and some of the practical implications they suggest arise from their conclusion. Specifically, I argue that Purves and Delon are wrong to suggest that intentional agency is necessary for one’s life to be meaningful; contributing to valuable states of affairs can be sufficient by itself. Purves and Delon’s objection to such a claim is that it would allow even inanimate objects’ existences to count as meaningful. However, while I accept this... (shrink)

This paper is a discussion note on Isaacs et al. (2022), who have claimed to offer a new motivation for imprecise probabilities, based on the mathematical phenomenon of non-measurability. In this note, I clarify some consequences of their proposal. In particular, I show that if their proposal is applied to a bounded 3-dimensional space, then they have to reject at least one of the following: (i) If A is at most as probable as B and B is at most as (...) probable as C, then A is at most as probable as C. (ii) Let A ∩ C = B ∩ C = ∅. A is at most as probable as B iff (A ∪ C) is at most as probable as (B ∪ C). But rejecting either statement seems unattractive. (shrink)

In his writing, Gilles Deleuze drew on a vast array of source material, from philosophy and psychoanalysis to science and art. Yet scholars have largely neglected one of the intellectual currents underlying his work: Western esotericism, specifically the lineage of hermetic thought that extends from Late Antiquity into the Renaissance through the work of figures such as Iamblichus, Nicholas of Cusa, Pico della Mirandola, and Giordano Bruno. In this book, Joshua Ramey examines the extent to which Deleuze's ethics, metaphysics, (...) and politics were informed by, and can only be fully understood through, this hermetic tradition. Identifying key hermetic moments in Deleuze's thought, including his theories of art, subjectivity, and immanence, Ramey argues that the philosopher's work represents a kind of contemporary hermeticism, a consistent experiment in unifying thought and affect, percept and concept, and mind and nature in order to engender new relations between knowledge, power, and desire. By uncovering and clarifying the hermetic strand in Deleuze's work, Ramey offers both a new interpretation of Deleuze, particularly his insistence that the development of thought demands a spiritual ordeal, and a framework for retrieving the pre-Kantian paradigm of philosophy as spiritual practice. (shrink)

While developments of a shared intellectual tradition, the enactivist approach and the organizational account proffer importantly different accounts of organismic normativity. Where enactivists tend to follow Hans Jonas, Andres Weber, and Francisco Varela in grounding intrinsic affordance norms in existential concern, organizational theorists such as Alvaro Moreno, Matteo Mossio, and Leonardo Bich seek a more deflationary account of these normative phenomena. Critiques directed at both of these accounts of organismic normativity motivate the introduction of the precedential account of organismic normativity, (...) which I nevertheless locate within the enactivist approach, broadly construed. After detailing empirical evidence that would seem to vindicate the precedential account, I explore some of its implications. (shrink)

The arc of the moral universe -- Structure, choice, and legitimacy: Locke's theory of the state -- Democratic equality -- A more democratic liberalism -- For a democratic society -- Knowledge, morality and hope: the social thought of Noam Chomsky: with Joel Rogers -- Reflections on Habermas on democracy -- A matter of demolition?: Susan Okin on justice and gender -- Minimalism about human rights: the most we can hope for? -- Is there a human right to democracy? -- Extra (...) republicam nulla justitia?: with Charles Sabel. (shrink)