Peter Strawson makes a crucial distinction between reactive attitudes and the objective attitude. Reactive attitudes such as gratefulness, anger and indignation imply that we take each other seriously as responsible agents. The objective attitude implies that we stop taking each other seriously. Strawson argues that the objective attitude is not merely psychologically difficult: it is inconceivable that we would systematically refrain from taking each other seriously and stop discussing with each other or blaming ourselves or others. Strawson, however, only discusses (...) the reactive attitudes from a general point of view. In this paper, we argue that the reactive attitudes of remorse and moral indignation are forms of ”symbolic restoration’. Retributive punishment should also be interpreted from this perspective. Consequently, our concern with moral blame cannot be understood independently from a concern with the harm that has occurred. Our attitude to the outcome determines our attitude to the agent. The concern with the mental state is secondary: it is structured by its place within the practice of symbolic restoration. (shrink)

A transcript of three lectures, given at Princeton University in 1970, which deals with (inter alia) debates concerning proper names in the philosophy of language.

In De sacraliteit van leven en dood Arnold Burms and Herman De Dijn take a strong anti-theoretical stance on bio-ethical issues. They contend that when we answer bio-ethical questions, we should pay more attention to the symbolic distinctions which structure common sense moral sensitivity, such as those between human and animal, man and woman, parent and child, and so on. In this critical review I argue that their rejection of modern ethical theories is over-simplifying and that their refusal to ground (...) symbolic distinctions more thoroughly in nature is flawed. In my view the book gives us little to hold on to when we deal with bio-ethical questions. (shrink)

In ethical reflections on new technologies, a specific type of argument often pops up, which criticizes scientists for “playing God” with these new technological possibilities. The first part of this article is an examination of how these arguments have been interpreted in the literature. Subsequently, this article aims to reinterpret these arguments as symbolic arguments: they are grounded not so much in a set of ontological or empirical claims, but concern symbolic classificatory schemes that ground our value judgments in the (...) first place. Invoking symbolic arguments thus refers to how certain new technologies risk undermining our fundamental symbolic distinctions by which we organize and evaluate our interactions with the world and in society. Such symbolic distinctions, moreover, tend to be resilient against logical argumentation, mainly because they themselves form the basis on which we argue in the cultural and ethical sphere in the first place. Therefore, effective strategies to evaluate and counter these arguments require another approach, showing that these technologies either do not challenge these classifications or, if they do, how they can be accompanied by the proper actions to integrate these technologies into our society. (shrink)

Death.--The absurd.--Moral luck.--Sexual perversion.--War and massacre.--Ruthlessness in public life.--The policy of preference.--Equality.--The fragmentation of value.--Ethics without biology.--Brain bisection and the unity of consciousness.--What is it like to be a bat?--Panpsychism.--Subjective and objective.

No study in the philosophy of science created such controversy in the seventies as Paul Feyerabend's Against Method. In this work, Feyerabend reviews that controversy, and extends his critique beyond the problem of scientific rules and methods, to the social function and direction of science today. In the first part of the book, he launches a sustained and irreverent attack on the prestige of science in the West. The lofty authority of the "expert" claimed by scientists is, he argues, incompatible (...) with any genuine democracy, and often merely serves to conceal entrenched prejudices and divided opinions with the scientific community itself. Feyerabend insists that these can and should be subjected to the arbitration of the lay population, whose closes interests they constantly affect—as struggles over atomic energy programs so powerfully attest. Calling for far greater diversity in the content of education to facilitate democratic decisions over such issues, Feyerabend recounts the origin and development of his own ideas—successively engaged by Brecht, Ehrenhaft, Popper, Mill and Lakatos—in a spirited intellectual self-portrait. Science in a Free Society is a striking intervention into one of the most topical debates in contemporary culture and politics. (shrink)

Benadering van enkele klassieke filosofische kwesties vanuit een door de Angelsaksische taalfilosofie geïnspireerde visie op de zingevende rede.

The doyen of living English philosophers, by these reflections, took hold of and changed the outlook of a good many other philosophers, if not quite enough. He did so, essentially, by assuming that talk of freedom and responsibility is talk not of facts or truths, in a certain sense, but of our attitudes. His more explicit concern was to look again at the question of whether determinism and freedom are consistent with one another -- by shifting attention to certain personal (...) rather than moral attitudes, first of all gratitude and resentment. In the end, he arrived at a kind of Compatibilist or, as he says, Optimist conclusion. That is no doubt a recommendation but not the largest recommendation of this splendidly rich piece of philosophy. (shrink)

Wij presenteren Berardi’s herwerking van de ideologiekritiek in drie stappen. Eerst schetsen wij de context waarin Berardi de ideologiekritiek herdenkt. Hij bouwt verder op de ontdekking van Deleuze en Guattari dat de taal van het kapitalisme niet de code, maar de axiomatiek is. De economische wetenschap biedt, volgens hen, mensen geen identiteit aan, maar bestaat uit een reeks commando’s die stromen van geld, arbeid, elektriciteit, enzovoort reguleert. Daaraan koppelt Berardi de observatie dat het hedendaagse kapitalisme vooral tekens verhandelt in plaats (...) van producten waarnaar zulke tekens zouden verwijzen. In een tweede stap brengen wij tegen deze opvatting in dat Berardi nog steeds vasthoudt aan de representatieve waarde van de economische wetenschap. Deze laatste zou enkel een afbeelding bieden van de realiteit en die vervalsen in het voordeel van het status quo. Sociologen uit de traditie van de actor-netwerktheorie (ANT) hebben dat echter betwist. Zij beweren dat de economische wetenschap de economische realiteit niet zozeer afbeeldt, maar actief vormgeeft. De economische wetenschap heeft de mens geschapen naar zijn evenbeeld: als homo oeconomicus. Het is dan ook een vergissing om de economische wetenschap te bekritiseren voor haar valse representaties. Zij maakt die immers waar. In een derde en laatste stap leggen wij in Berardi’s teksten een nieuw criterium bloot voor ideologiekritiek. In plaats van de economische wetenschap te bekritiseren voor haar valse uitspraken over de realiteit, moeten wij nagaan of de economische wetenschap een manier van leven promoot die mensen in staat zijn te onderhouden. De economische wetenschap is dan ideologisch als en slechts als zij een onhoudbare vorm van leven propageert. Volgens Berardi kan de hedendaagse economische wetenschap hiervan terecht beschuldigd worden. In zijn psychopathologie van het kapitalisme wijst hij immers op de negatieve psychische gevolgen van het hedendaagse kapitalisme, namelijk de instandhouding van een cyclus tussen paniek en depressie, een verlies aan betekenisvol menselijk contact en een neiging tot neurotisch vasthouden aan oude economische recepten die hun failliet reeds meermaals bewezen hebben. Niet de waarheid zal ons verlossen, maar in de verlossing ligt het ware leven. (shrink)

In this paper the author argues that love de re — love for a particular person — is an emotion that is singular in that the beloved person is an external constituent of that emotion. After comparing love de re with other de re attitudes, and distinguishing it from love de dicto, he rejects reductions of love de re to love de dicto. It will be demonstrated the lover must have a dynamic conception of the person he loves which is (...) derived from historical connections with him or her. A merely causal link is not enough. The way the beloved person appears to the lover cannot be reduced to an antecedently available picture or assembly of properties the lover appreciates, as cognitivists tend to claim. The theoretical background of the paper draws on insights of G. Evans and J. McDowell. (shrink)

There is a strong mentalistic tendency in the tradition of philosophy toward a depreciation of the exteriority of linguistic tokens. Two arguments commonly motivate this claim : 1. Mental contents are in principle autonomous as far as reference and meaning are concerned. Linguistic tokens are instruments used to express meaning or to clarify reference. 2. The linguistic tokens chosen for this purpose are only arbitrarily connected with the mental contents they express or clarify. The legitimacy of this depreciation has been (...) convincingly challenged by the later Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein's explorations of the field of artistic tokens (music, poetry) play a pivotal role in his critique of mentalism. These explorations are all the more provocative because they consider precisely those registers of language that are pregnant with mental representations. The point of Wittgenstein's critique is that there is an internal relation between the meaning of a linguistic token and its exteriority. No token can be replaced by another token without affecting its meaning. What is true of poetry, is true of proper names too. Contrary to a presupposition of the cluster concept theory of proper names — a theory commonly and wrongly associated with the name of Wittgenstein — proper names too cannot be replaced by other tokens without loss or change of meaning. Words in general, and proper names in particular, are like faces. Not every human face is a face for us : only those who are near to us, those with whom we are familiar are „faces” for us. By analogy, words and proper names are only meaningful for us if we are in some sense familiar with them. They touch us like familiar faces. This explains why we can be attached to our own language. This form of attachment may be called linguistic particularism. Linguistic particularism is not an unhappy aberration or an inconvenience that should be remedied — as it is supposed to be by attempts to create a universal language, such as Esperanto; rather it is a fact that is intimately related to the structure of meaning. (shrink)

Levinas' view on ethical commitment seems at first sight incompatible with the cultivation of particularistic ideals. The Other from whom the moral imperative originates, is also a Stranger: in submitting ourselves to his appeal, we obey a law radically transcending our autonomy. Therefore, our responsibility for the Other is not a loyalty based on personal sympathies, preferences or common interests. From Levinas' stern universalistic perspective, particularistic loyalty might appear as a form of moral self-indulgence. In this article we draw attention (...) to two forms of particularistic attachment which can paradoxically be seen as a confrontation with a radical moral heteronomy. The moral obligation imposed on us by nearness in space and relations of close kinship are in a sense arbitrary and contingent. Just because they are beyond rational justification, they also transcend the autonomy of our rational will. In this sense it seems to be true that some forms of particularistic commitment can make us aware of the radical heteronomy as it is meant by Levinas. (shrink)

This paper does not question the thesis that the phenomena associated with the phrase 'moral luck' point to an important philosophical problem. The aim is, rather, to sketch an interpretation of these phenomena. It is argued that the notion of symbolic restoration is the key we need to understand why the out-come of our actions has a moral significance that is not reducible to the moral significance of the mental states from wich these actions arise.

One can assign three different aims to the desire for knowledge : utility, pleasure, truth-for-truth's-sake. Whereas the first two aims have a concretely determinable content and therefore look evident, the third one has been looked upon as strange and problematic : it is not immediately clear what kind of value is defended in this case. Popper is one of the recent defenders of the traditional ideal of truth-for-truth's-sake. He wants to defend the ideal against three positions : a primitive taboo-ridden (...) fear for knowledge and truth, relativism, instrumentalism. Analysing Popper's ethic of cognition we do not agree with the instrumentalist's critique of it. However, precisely in advocating a non-instrumentalist value, Popper's position is not unique, but paradoxically resembles the „primitive” position. Popper's belief that there is an objective or absolute truth is, in his opinion, implied by the belief that the search for knowledge makes sense. We try to show that this thesis of absolute truth is based on a conceptual mistake. In opposition to Popper's view, we sketch a form of relativism avoiding this confusion, without doing away with any concrete possibility of discussion or search for truth. At the same time, we try to understand Popper's aversion to relativism as well as the appeal of his position, in that it is a strange mixture of a heroic cognitive ethic and a desire for imaginary control over the uncontrolable. We argue that the form of relativism we advocate easily and perhaps better fulfilb the „heroic” readiness to forsake security in cognitive matters. (shrink)

The debate about the relation between science and truth is manifestly epistemological, but latently and fundamentally metaphysical. Popper's theory of verisimilitude provides us with a striking example. According to Popper, science aims at bringing us nearer to 'absolute, objective truth'; the growth of scientific knowledge is seen as a never ending realisation of that ultimate aim. This thesis of verisimilitude can be interpreted in two ways. In the first interpretation the thesis appears as a correct, but formal and even trivial (...) statement. Here the thesis that science aims at bringing us nearer to truth is as unilluminating as the thesis that moral endeavor aims at bringing us nearer to the Moral Good or that artistic endeavor aims at bringing us nearer to Aesthetic Beauty. According to the second interpretation, however, the thesis has a more substantial and metaphysical meaning. Here it consists of three different claims : 1. scientific endeavor points to something which is beyond and actual or humanly possible scientific achievement; 2. it is in this relation with something transcendent that the ultimate purpose of science is to be sought; 3. the relation between actual science and its transcendent should be seen as a part-whole relation, i.e. the transcendent goal should be represented as the ideal of total intelligibility. In this article the first and second claim are accepted; the third is rejected. One should accept the idea (put forward by Einstein ) that science points to a mystery beyond science. One should beware, however, of equating the sense of mystery with an anticipation for yet hidden information, inaccessible to us, but 'quoad se' accessible to reason. Science's transcendent mystery should be viewed in a more radical way. That is to say, the relation between actual science and its transcendent mystery is analogous to the relation between, on the one hand, the information contained in and derivable from a (good) poem and, on the other hand something else which is poetically suggested, yet does not consist in hidden information. What is evoked by poetry and science, is not even in principle translatable in terms of an informative content. Therefore the ultimate goal of science is not the ideal of knowing everything with the clarity and precision of science ; it is rather the awareness of a mystery which does not even exist as the sort of intelligible content scientific theories attempt to mirror. (shrink)

The classical formulations given to the problem of free will and determinism in analytical philosophy can be split into two groups according to a double function of the element : „to be able to act otherwise”. In the first case we speak of „the problem of autonomy” and in the second of „the problem of justifying punishment”. Both formulations are inadequate. „The problem of autonomy” is wrongly formulated, since determinism does not threaten our possibilities. „The problem of justifying punishment” is (...) likewise a wrong formulation, since the question of „being able to act otherwise” merely has a secondary role in the attribution of guilt. Nevertheless certain elements can be found in both formulations to provide us with a new formulation and it is in this direction that we should like to move. (shrink)