Much as we would like to conceive empirical thought as rationally grounded in experience, pitfalls await anyone who tries to articulate this position, and ...

In The Construction of Social Reality, John Searle argues that there are two kinds of facts--some that are independent of human observers, and some that require..

The recent debate between conceptualists and phenomenologists, epitomized in the exchange between John McDowell and Hubert Dreyfus, has put on the table the age-old philosophical problem of the rel...

The unifying theme of these thirteen essays is understanding.

Dialectics is the logic of estrangement. Self-relating negativity, which is at once every difference and its overcoming, is the pulse of dialectics. But what is this self-estranging sameness? For Hegel, the idealist, it is “the absolute concept.” It is more difficult to say what it is for Marx, who is supposed to be a materialist. If Marx were merely relocating self-estranging sameness from the concept to human “genus-being” (Gattungswesen), understood as a historically variable “ensemble of social relations,” this ensemble would (...) harbour a potentiality to become that is at once enabled and disabled by the social divisions of labour and class that they have generated. This interpretation is vitiated by an ambiguity in its invocation of potentiality. If we flatten human genus-being onto historically variable social relations, there is no latency left in it which could be said to be unactualized by existing social practices. But if some aspect of genus-being is held in reserve as an unactualized potential, we risk re-substantializing it as an a-historical essence. It is this ambiguity that leads Marx’s critics to accuse him of invoking a transcendent conception of human essence despite his insistence that this essence is a function of historically variable social relations. I want to parry this criticism by suggesting that Marx’s materialism requires Hegel’s self-estranging sameness in order to dissolve the apparent dichotomy between immanence and transcendence in the potency ascribed to practice. Estrangement and de-estrangement, compulsion and freedom, are not separable moments but twin facets of the same movement. The prospect of de-estrangement emerges only by retrospecting an enabling estrangement. (shrink)

Extending the project of analysis -- Elaborating abilities : the expressive role of logic -- Artificial intelligence and analytic pragmatism -- Modality and normativity : from Hume and Quine to Kant and Sellars -- Incompatibility, modal semantics, and intrinsic logic -- Intentionality as a pragmatically mediated semantic relation -- Afterword : philosophical analysis and analytic philosophy.

Robert Brandom's latest book, the product of his John Locke lectures in Oxford in 2006, is a return to the philosophy of language and is easily read as a continuation and development of the views defended in Making it Explicit. The text of the lectures is presented much as they were delivered, but it contains an ‘Afterword’ of more than 30 pages which responds to questions raised when he gave the lectures, and also when they were subsequently delivered in Prague (...) the following year. The published text also contains relatively technical appendices to two of the lectures.The individual lectures engage with some important and difficult issues, often ones that were explored in detail in the earlier book. However, these discussions are located within a broader meta-philosophical context, and it says something about the abstract and difficult character of these views that they provide the main subject matter of the Afterword. This framework affects how we should understand the relations between this book and Making It Explicit too. Although most of the detailed discussions happily belong within the general project of the earlier book, they are offered as illustrations of a framework that is independent of this project. Indeed, Brandom suggests that defenders of the semantic views of David Lewis, for example, could embrace his main message as well as those who favour Brandom's own form of pragmatism.Neo-pragmatist philosophers such as Brandom's teacher, Richard Rorty, often present themselves as rejecting the analytic tradition in philosophy. When Brandom describes the ‘pragmatist challenge’ to the ‘classical project of analysis’, he appeals to the criticisms found in the work of Wittgenstein and Sellars that are often appealed to by the critics of the analytic tradition. The message of the new book is that the views he has built on this …. (shrink)

This new work provides an approachable introduction to the complex system that Making It Explicit mapped out.

This book provides a comprehensive account of the intentionality of perceptual experience. With special emphasis on vision Searle explains how the raw phenomenology of perception sets the content and the conditions of satisfaction of experience.

_Vygotsky Philosophy and Education_ reassesses the works of Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky work by arguing that his central ideas about the nature of rationality and knowledge were informed by the philosophic tradition of Spinoza and Hegel. Presents a reassessment of the works of Lev Vygotsky in light of the tradition of Spinoza and Hegel informing his work Reveals Vygotsky’s connection with the work of contemporary philosophers such as Brandom and McDowell Draws on discussions in contemporary philosophy to revise prominent readings (...) of Vygotskian psychology and revisits educational debates where Vygotsky’s ideas were central Reveals the limitations of appropriations of Vygotsky which fail to recognize the Hegelian provenance of his work Shows the relevance of Brandom’s inferentialism for contemporary educational theory and practice. (shrink)

Robert R. Williams offers a bold new account of divergences and convergences in the work of Hegel and Nietzsche. He explores four themes - the philosophy of tragedy; recognition and community; critique of Kant; and the death of God - and explicates both thinkers' critiques of traditional theology and metaphysics.

In _The Formation of Reason_, philosophy professor David Bakhurst utilizes ideas from philosopher John McDowell to develop and defend a socio-historical account of the human mind. Provides the first detailed examination of the relevance of John McDowell's work to the Philosophy of Education Draws on a wide-range of philosophical sources, including the work of 'analytic' philosophers Donald Davidson, Ian Hacking, Peter Strawson, David Wiggins, and Ludwig Wittgenstein Considers non-traditional ideas from Russian philosophy and psychology, represented by Ilyenkov and Vygotsky Discusses (...) foundational philosophical ideas in a way that reveals their relevance to educational theory and practice. (shrink)

L.S. Vygotsky’s “regulative” account of the development of human thinking hinges on the centralization of “directive” speech acts (commands or imperatives). With directives, one directs the activity of another, and in turn begins to “self-direct” (or self-regulate). It’s my claim that Vygotsky’s reliance on directives de facto keeps his account stuck at Tomasello's level of individual intentionality. Directive speech acts feature prominently in Tomasello’s developmental story as well. But Tomasello has the benefit of accounting for a functional differentiation in directive (...) communication—i.e., in collaborative activity, the command gives way to both the request and informational assertion. Lacking such differentiation, Vygotsky’s account runs the risk of playing to a rather strident conception of the socius, one more Machiavellian than Marxist. (shrink)

Siyaves Azeri (2020) quite well shows that arithmetical thinking emerges on the basis of specific social practices and material engagement (clay tokens for economic exchange practices beget number concepts, e.g.). But his discussion here is relegated mostly to Neolithic and Bronze Age practices. While surely such practices produced revolutions in the cognitive abilities of many humans, much of the cognitive architecture that allows normative conceptual thought was already in place long before this time. This response, then, is an attempt to (...) sketch the deep prehistory of human cognition in order to show the inter-social bases of normative thought in general. To do this, I will look first to the work of Vygotsky and Leontiev, two often neglected psychologists whose combined efforts culminate in a developmental account of human cognitive origins. Then, I will review some key insights from the contemporary comparative psychologist Michael Tomasello—whose project is admittedly a Vygotskian one—in order to further shed light on the social-practical basis of abstract thought, of which mathematical cognition is surely a part. (shrink)