Kant’s brilliant original contributions to political thought cannot be understood without attention to his dynamic concept of provisional right, argues Elisabeth Ellis in this book—the first comprehensive interpretation of Kant’s political theory. Kant’s notion of provisional right applies to existing institutions and practices that are consistent with the possibility of progress. Ellis traces this idea through Kant’s works and demonstrates that the concept of provisional right can be used both to illuminate contemporary theoretical debates and to generate (...) policy implications. In this new interpretation, Kant’s provisionalism provides a broad standard for political right that remains deeply responsive to historical and geographical particulars, directing our attention to the dynamism between our world and our ideals. Ellis offers us Kant for our time—worldly, pragmatic, and intensely committed to the everyday pursuit of human freedom. (shrink)

True,Kant takes the conclusions of his ethical work for granted in his political theorizing; he treats corollaries of the categorical imperative as conclusive principles of political right.However,in his political theory his concern is not simply to lay ...

Social contract thought has always contained multiple and mutually conflicting lines of argument; the minimalist contractarianism so influential today represents the weaker of two main constellations of claims. I make the case for a Kantian contract theory that emphasizes the bedrock principle of consent of the governed instead of the mere heuristic device of the exit from the state of nature. Such a shift in emphasis resolves two classic difficulties: tradi- tional contract theory’s ahistorical presumption of a pre-political settlement, and (...) its impossibly high demands on citizens seeking to practice self-rule. Kant’s solutions to these problems of property rights and citizenship are found in his political works, rather than the ethical works through which Kant’s political theory is usually interpreted. (shrink)

"A collection of essays examining Immanuel Kant's lectures and minor writings as well as his political essays.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Third Concept of Liberty. Judgment and Freedom in Kant and Adam SmithElisabeth EllisSamuel Fleischacker. A Third Concept of Liberty. Judgment and Freedom in Kant and Adam Smith. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Cloth, $70.00. Pp. 338.Samuel Fleischacker's lively and ambitious new book on judgment makes significant contributions to the literature interpreting Kant and Smith. He constructs a powerful [End Page 447] theory of free human judgment from (...) Kant's third Critique and Smith's Wealth of Nations, using this theory to revise Isaiah Berlin's classic distinction between negative and positive freedom. By arguing for what he calls "a third concept of liberty," Fleischacker hopes "to make the world free for good judgment" (243).Fleischacker begins his book with three chapters on "the nature of judgment," which include a controversial but ultimately convincing reading of Kant's writing on aesthetic judgment. Having outlined a Kantian theory of judgment, Fleischacker moves in the next six chapters to "the politics of judgment," reading Smith's Wealth of Nations in light of Aristotle's philosophy of phronesis (and also, rightly, in the context of Smith's own Theory of Moral Sentiments). This second section concludes with two extremely interesting chapters on politics and judgment in Kant and Rawls, in which Fleischacker weaves a number of controversial hypotheses, for example, that Kant's Groundwork was fundamentally influenced by Adam Smith (229n.), or that Kant included gender-based inequality among the types of tutelage to be overcome (186n.), into a strong critique of contemporary political philosophy. To both the utilitarian and the deontological traditions in political thought, Fleischacker opposes a "third way," in which the basis of political legitimacy is rooted in neither desire nor reason, but in the capacity for judgment. Fleischacker concludes his book with a single chapter on "the freedom of judgment," in which he argues for this philosophy against a series of representatives of alternative views.Interpreting Kant's political philosophy, Fleischacker directs our attention away from the familiar calculus of universal rules and toward what this reader agrees is the more authentically Kantian politics of gradual progress toward freedom. From this interpretation, he derives a very interesting critique of Kant's most prominent present-day successors:Rawls and Habermas try to uncover a framework for just politics from the structure of reason itself, and their projects fail, deeply and irremediably, because that structure cannot tell us anything, by itself, about its own proper application to concrete matters of public policy. Kant's own political writings are more closely engaged with specific, contingent issues of his day. Surprisingly, perhaps, Kant has considerably greater respect for history, and for empirical fact, than do his modern-day followers.(184)Fleischacker is not the only scholar interested in directing our attention toward Kant's pragmatic politics. See, for example, John Christian Laursen, The Politics of Skepticism in the Ancients, Montaigne, Hume, and Kant (Leiden and New York: E. J. Brill, 1992). Fleischacker goes on to emphasize that for Kant political freedom is something to be achieved over time via such institutions as civic education and a free press. As such, political freedom is not identical with freedom of the will, and thus for Fleischacker, Kant's political arguments do not depend on defending transcendental freedom. Instead, Fleischacker argues, a truly Kantian politics will address the conditions for the free exercise of individual judgment. "Freedom.... can be developed empirically... " (186). Though generally convincing, Fleischacker's reading of Kant's politics is vulnerable to criticism on some points of interpretation. For example, by overlooking Kant's [End Page 448] account of provisional right in the Rechtslehre, Fleischacker misses one of the most important of Kant's attempts to translate judgment's mediating function into political practice.If A Third Concept of Liberty elides some interpretive issues (such as the relationship between aesthetic and moral decision-making (23n.), the book confronts the most important questions of present-day political theory head on. Fleischacker makes a number of far-reaching but also quite specific proposals for moving the world closer to a realm of free human judgment. Against negative libertarians such as Milton Friedman, Fleischacker calls for governmental activism to... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Third Concept of Liberty. Judgment and Freedom in Kant and Adam SmithElisabeth EllisSamuel Fleischacker. A Third Concept of Liberty. Judgment and Freedom in Kant and Adam Smith. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Cloth, $70.00. Pp. 338.Samuel Fleischacker's lively and ambitious new book on judgment makes significant contributions to the literature interpreting Kant and Smith. He constructs a powerful [End Page 447] theory of free human judgment from (...) Kant's third Critique and Smith's Wealth of Nations, using this theory to revise Isaiah Berlin's classic distinction between negative and positive freedom. By arguing for what he calls "a third concept of liberty," Fleischacker hopes "to make the world free for good judgment" (243).Fleischacker begins his book with three chapters on "the nature of judgment," which include a controversial but ultimately convincing reading of Kant's writing on aesthetic judgment. Having outlined a Kantian theory of judgment, Fleischacker moves in the next six chapters to "the politics of judgment," reading Smith's Wealth of Nations in light of Aristotle's philosophy of phronesis (and also, rightly, in the context of Smith's own Theory of Moral Sentiments). This second section concludes with two extremely interesting chapters on politics and judgment in Kant and Rawls, in which Fleischacker weaves a number of controversial hypotheses, for example, that Kant's Groundwork was fundamentally influenced by Adam Smith (229n.), or that Kant included gender-based inequality among the types of tutelage to be overcome (186n.), into a strong critique of contemporary political philosophy. To both the utilitarian and the deontological traditions in political thought, Fleischacker opposes a "third way," in which the basis of political legitimacy is rooted in neither desire nor reason, but in the capacity for judgment. Fleischacker concludes his book with a single chapter on "the freedom of judgment," in which he argues for this philosophy against a series of representatives of alternative views.Interpreting Kant's political philosophy, Fleischacker directs our attention away from the familiar calculus of universal rules and toward what this reader agrees is the more authentically Kantian politics of gradual progress toward freedom. From this interpretation, he derives a very interesting critique of Kant's most prominent present-day successors:Rawls and Habermas try to uncover a framework for just politics from the structure of reason itself, and their projects fail, deeply and irremediably, because that structure cannot tell us anything, by itself, about its own proper application to concrete matters of public policy. Kant's own political writings are more closely engaged with specific, contingent issues of his day. Surprisingly, perhaps, Kant has considerably greater respect for history, and for empirical fact, than do his modern-day followers.(184)Fleischacker is not the only scholar interested in directing our attention toward Kant's pragmatic politics. See, for example, John Christian Laursen, The Politics of Skepticism in the Ancients, Montaigne, Hume, and Kant (Leiden and New York: E. J. Brill, 1992). Fleischacker goes on to emphasize that for Kant political freedom is something to be achieved over time via such institutions as civic education and a free press. As such, political freedom is not identical with freedom of the will, and thus for Fleischacker, Kant's political arguments do not depend on defending transcendental freedom. Instead, Fleischacker argues, a truly Kantian politics will address the conditions for the free exercise of individual judgment. "Freedom.... can be developed empirically... " (186). Though generally convincing, Fleischacker's reading of Kant's politics is vulnerable to criticism on some points of interpretation. For example, by overlooking Kant's [End Page 448] account of provisional right in the Rechtslehre, Fleischacker misses one of the most important of Kant's attempts to translate judgment's mediating function into political practice.If A Third Concept of Liberty elides some interpretive issues (such as the relationship between aesthetic and moral decision-making (23n.), the book confronts the most important questions of present-day political theory head on. Fleischacker makes a number of far-reaching but also quite specific proposals for moving the world closer to a realm of free human judgment. Against negative libertarians such as Milton Friedman, Fleischacker calls for governmental activism to... (shrink)

The Encyclopedia of Political Thought is the most comprehensive and rigorous treatment of significant political thinkers, political theories, concepts, ideas, and schools of thought. Comprises over 900 A-Z entries, including brief definitions, biographies, and major topics, written by a team of 700 contributors from around the world Explores key theories and theorists, including non-western perspectives, in tracing the evolution of political thought from antiquity to the present day Published in association with The Foundations of Political Theory, an organized section of (...) the American Political Science Association 8 Volumes www.encyclopediaofpoliticalthought.com. (shrink)

In God, Value, and Nature, Fiona Ellis dissects philosophical and theological positions on the metaphysics of our universe. Drawing on the works of John McDowell and Peter Railton, Ellis examines the dominant dichotomy between naturalism and supernaturalism among the perspectives of scientists, philosophers, and theologians. She challenges this metaphysical bifurcation, reframing the question of naturalism. Rather than asking what fits into the category of natural and what fits into the category of supernatural, the question should be, how should (...) we understand this category of natural that we are talking about in the first place? Ellis then seeks to expand the scope of what... (shrink)

Current models of delusion converge in proposing that delusional beliefs are based on unusual experiences of various kinds. For example, it is argued that the Capgras delusion (the belief that a known person has been replaced by an impostor) is triggered by an abnormal affective experience in response to seeing a known person; loss of the affective response to a familiar person’s face may lead to the belief that the person has been replaced by an impostor (Ellis & Young, (...) 1990). Similarly, the Cotard delusion (which involves the belief that one is dead or unreal in some way) may stem from a general.. (shrink)

A full account of purposive action must appeal not only to propositional attitude states like beliefs, desires, and intentions, but also to motor representations, i.e., non-propositional states that are thought to represent, among other things, action outcomes as well as detailed kinematic features of bodily movements. This raises the puzzle of how it is that these two distinct types of state successfully coordinate. We examine this so-called “Interface Problem”. First, we clarify and expand on the nature and role of motor (...) representations in explaining intentional action. Next, we characterize the respective functions of intentions and motor representations, the differences in representational format and content that these imply, and the interface challenge these differences in turn raise. We then evaluate Butterfill and Sinigaglia’s recent answer to this interface challenge, according to which intentions refer to action outcomes by way of demonstrative deference to motor representations. We present some worries for this proposal, arguing that, among other things, it implicitly presupposes a solution to the problem, and so cannot help to resolve it. Finally, we suggest that we may make some progress on this puzzle by positing a “content-preserving causal process” taking place between intentions and motor representations, and we offer a proposal for how this might work. (shrink)

Feminist philosophers have discussed the prospects for assessing values empirically, particularly given the ongoing threat of sexism and other oppressive values influencing science and society. Some advocates of such tests now champion a “values as evidence” approach, and they criticize Helen Longino’s contextual empiricism for not holding values to the same level of empirical scrutiny as other claims. In this paper, we defend contextual empiricism by arguing that many of these criticisms are based on mischaracterizations of Longino’s position, overstatements of (...) certain claims, and false dichotomies. Her contextual empiricism not only allows for the empirical support and disconfirmation of values, but Longino explicitly discusses when values can be empirically adjudicated and emphasizes the crucial role of the community for standards of evidence. We support contextual empiricism and elaborate a less direct account of “values as heuristics” by reviewing Longino’s theory of evidence and then using a case study from Elisabeth Lloyd on the biology of female orgasm, demonstrating the disconfirmation of androcentric values in evolutionary science. Within Longino’s and Lloyd’s contextual empiricism, values do not get treated as empirical evidence to be directly assessed by individuals, but rather values are heuristic tools to build models whose use can be validated or invalidated by communities based on their empirical fruitfulness in the logic and pragmatics of research questions in specific historical and cultural contexts. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 11.1 (2004) 65-70 [Access article in PDF] Top-Down and Bottom-Up in Delusion Formation Jakob Hohwy Keywords delusions, top-down, bottom-up, predictive coding Some delusions may arise as responses to unusual experiences (Davies et al. 2001; Maher 1974;). The implication is that delusion formation in some cases involves some kind of bottom-up mechanism—roughly, from perception to belief. Delusion formation may also involve some kind of top-down mechanism. (...) This could be in the shape of a patient's flawed background beliefs, or biases, which somehow modulate perception or ensure delusional interpretations of experience. There is little agreement about what kind of mechanism is primary in delusion formation, or, indeed, what the particular mechanisms and their neural substrates might be.In the evaluation of top-down and bottom-up mechanisms in delusion formation, a number of conceptual questions should be addressed (Davies and Coltheart 2000). For example, if there is an experiential component, why is a hypothesis with a delusional explanation of the unusual experience seen as relevant? Why do the subjects come to believe it tenaciously? How come some unusual experiences do not develop into delusions?A number of empirical findings also need to be taken into account: for example, the damage to the autonomic system in Capgras delusion (Ellis et al. 1997), the decreased ability for fast error correction in schizophrenia (Frith and Done 1989), modulation of activity in parietal cortex in delusions of alien control and other passivity experiences (Blakemore, Oakley, and Frith 2003), and also in schizophrenia, the increased sensitivity to self-produced stimuli, such as tickling oneself (Blakemore et al. 2000) and the sound of one's own voice (Ford et al. 2001).Theory choice can also be guided by philosophical doctrines about, for example, the nature of belief, the constitutive role of rationality, and intersubjectivity and the nature of judgements about the external world. It is natural, however, to let beliefs about philosophical doctrine be secondary to empirical findings and conceptual issues.The distinction between bottom-up and top-down mechanisms is particularly sharp in John Campbell's (2001) account of delusions and in Tim Bayne and Elisabeth Pacherie's (2004) discussion of Campbell. In this discussion, top-down approaches are associated with the general philosophical doctrine of rationalism, and bottom-up approaches with the philosophical doctrine of empiricism. Campbell's account is top-down because he posits delusional framework beliefs that arise directly as a result of brain damage or malfunction, and that work in some top-down fashion on the interpretation of experience. Bayne [End Page 65] and Pacherie convincingly defend empiricism against Campbell's rationalist account. Among their many other objections, they briefly puzzle about how a delusional framework belief (e.g., that one's spouse is an impostor) in a top-down fashion could cause the damage to the autonomic system seen in the Capgras and Cotard delusions (2004, 1). I think this is a very important objection because skin conductance data are part of the evidence for the bottom-up hypothesis concerning the Capgras delusion. We could add to this, for example, that it is mysterious how belief in a top-down fashion could cause people with schizophrenia to be worse at fast error correction than normal controls, to be better at tickling themselves than normal controls, and to have an increased response to the sound of their own voice.On the other hand, although the skin conductance response (SCR) evidence suggests a bottom-up approach to the Capgras delusion, it does not explain the character of the subjective experience that is hypothesized to give rise to the delusional belief: reduced SCR is not part of the experience itself (thanks to Ian Gold for discussion of this). Something more is required to give a full account of the type of experience that gives rise to the delusion. Further, as they stand, most bottom-up accounts are unable to account for why reality testing fails for beliefs based on these experiences.Neither rationalism nor empiricism on their own seem able to address the conceptual questions while paying... (shrink)

Most of us create and use a panoply of non-sentential representations throughout our ordinary lives: we regularly use maps to navigate, charts to keep track of complex patterns of data, and diagrams to visualize logical and causal relations among states of affairs. But philosophers typically pay little attention to such representations, focusing almost exclusively on language instead. In particular, when theorizing about the mind, many philosophers assume that there is a very tight mapping between language and thought. Some analyze utterances (...) as the outer vocalizations of inner thoughts (e.g. Grice 1957, Devitt 2005), while others treat thought as a form of inner speech (e.g. Sellars 1956/1997, Carruthers 2002). But even philosophers who take no stand on the relative priority of language and thought still tend to individuate mental states in terms of the sentences we use to ascribe them. Indeed, Dummett (1993) claims that it is constitutive of analytic philosophy that it approaches the mind by way of language. In many ways, this linguistic model is salutary. Our thoughts are often intimately intertwined with their linguistic expression, and public language does provide a comparatively tractable proxy for, and a window into, the messier realm of thought. However, an exclusive focus on thought as it is expressed in language threatens to leave other sorts of thought unexplained, or even to blind us to their possibility. In particular, many cognitive ethologists and psychologists find it useful to talk about humans, chimpanzees, birds, rats, and even bees as employing cognitive maps. We need to make sense of this way of talking about minds as well as more familiar sentential descriptions. In what follows, I investigate the theoretical and practical possibility of non-sentential thought. Ultimately, I am most interested in the contours of distinctively human thought: what forms does human thought take, and how do those different forms interact? How does human thought compare with that of other animals? In this essay, however, I focus on a narrower and more basic theoretical question: could thought occur in maps? Many philosophers are convinced that in some important sense, thought per se must be language-like.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 11.1 (2004) 65-70 [Access article in PDF] Top-Down and Bottom-Up in Delusion Formation Jakob Hohwy Keywords delusions, top-down, bottom-up, predictive coding Some delusions may arise as responses to unusual experiences (Davies et al. 2001; Maher 1974;). The implication is that delusion formation in some cases involves some kind of bottom-up mechanism—roughly, from perception to belief. Delusion formation may also involve some kind of top-down mechanism. (...) This could be in the shape of a patient's flawed background beliefs, or biases, which somehow modulate perception or ensure delusional interpretations of experience. There is little agreement about what kind of mechanism is primary in delusion formation, or, indeed, what the particular mechanisms and their neural substrates might be.In the evaluation of top-down and bottom-up mechanisms in delusion formation, a number of conceptual questions should be addressed (Davies and Coltheart 2000). For example, if there is an experiential component, why is a hypothesis with a delusional explanation of the unusual experience seen as relevant? Why do the subjects come to believe it tenaciously? How come some unusual experiences do not develop into delusions?A number of empirical findings also need to be taken into account: for example, the damage to the autonomic system in Capgras delusion (Ellis et al. 1997), the decreased ability for fast error correction in schizophrenia (Frith and Done 1989), modulation of activity in parietal cortex in delusions of alien control and other passivity experiences (Blakemore, Oakley, and Frith 2003), and also in schizophrenia, the increased sensitivity to self-produced stimuli, such as tickling oneself (Blakemore et al. 2000) and the sound of one's own voice (Ford et al. 2001).Theory choice can also be guided by philosophical doctrines about, for example, the nature of belief, the constitutive role of rationality, and intersubjectivity and the nature of judgements about the external world. It is natural, however, to let beliefs about philosophical doctrine be secondary to empirical findings and conceptual issues.The distinction between bottom-up and top-down mechanisms is particularly sharp in John Campbell's (2001) account of delusions and in Tim Bayne and Elisabeth Pacherie's (2004) discussion of Campbell. In this discussion, top-down approaches are associated with the general philosophical doctrine of rationalism, and bottom-up approaches with the philosophical doctrine of empiricism. Campbell's account is top-down because he posits delusional framework beliefs that arise directly as a result of brain damage or malfunction, and that work in some top-down fashion on the interpretation of experience. Bayne [End Page 65] and Pacherie convincingly defend empiricism against Campbell's rationalist account. Among their many other objections, they briefly puzzle about how a delusional framework belief (e.g., that one's spouse is an impostor) in a top-down fashion could cause the damage to the autonomic system seen in the Capgras and Cotard delusions (2004, 1). I think this is a very important objection because skin conductance data are part of the evidence for the bottom-up hypothesis concerning the Capgras delusion. We could add to this, for example, that it is mysterious how belief in a top-down fashion could cause people with schizophrenia to be worse at fast error correction than normal controls, to be better at tickling themselves than normal controls, and to have an increased response to the sound of their own voice.On the other hand, although the skin conductance response (SCR) evidence suggests a bottom-up approach to the Capgras delusion, it does not explain the character of the subjective experience that is hypothesized to give rise to the delusional belief: reduced SCR is not part of the experience itself (thanks to Ian Gold for discussion of this). Something more is required to give a full account of the type of experience that gives rise to the delusion. Further, as they stand, most bottom-up accounts are unable to account for why reality testing fails for beliefs based on these experiences.Neither rationalism nor empiricism on their own seem able to address the conceptual questions while paying... (shrink)

I take up three puzzles about our emotional and evaluative responses to fiction. First, how can we even have emotional responses to characters and events that we know not to exist, if emotions are as intimately connected to belief and action as they seem to be? One solution to this puzzle claims that we merely imagine having such emotional responses. But this raises the puzzle of why we would ever refuse to follow an author’s instructions to imagine such responses, since (...) we happily imagine many other implausible things. A natural response to this second puzzle is that our responses to fiction are real, and so can’t just be conjured up in response to an author’s demands. However, this simple response is inadequate, because we often respond differently to people and events in fiction than we would if we encountered them in real life. Solving these three puzzles in a consistent way requires the notion of a “perspective” on a fictional world. I sketch an account of this intuitive but frustratingly amorphous notion: perspectives are tools for organizing our thinking, which can in turn alter our emotional and evaluative responses. Cultivating a perspective can be illuminating, entertaining, or corrupting — or all three at once. (shrink)

In Francesco Berto’s words, the term “Serious Actualism” is used for the position “that any object must exist in every circumstance in which it has any property – the thesis that predication, or the having of properties as such, entails existence.” (“Modal Meinongianism and Fiction: The Best of Three Worlds”, Philosophical Studies 152, 2011, 324f.) Berto agrees with Nathan Salmon that Serious Actualism is “a confused and misguided prejudice” (Salmon, “Nonexistence”, Noûs 32, 1998, 290). The aim of this paper is (...) to defend the doctrine of Serious Actualism against this verdict. (shrink)

On a familiar and prima facie plausible view of metaphor, speakers who speak metaphorically say one thing in order to mean another. A variety of theorists have recently challenged this view; they offer criteria for distinguishing what is said from what is merely meant, and argue that these support classifying metaphor within 'what is said'. I consider four such criteria, and argue that when properly understood, they support the traditional classification instead. I conclude by sketching how we might extract a (...) workable notion of 'what is said' from ordinary intuitions about saying. (shrink)

I argue that we can reconcile two seemingly incompatible traditions for thinking about concepts. On the one hand, many cognitive scientists assume that the systematic redeployment of representational abilities suffices for having concepts. On the other hand, a long philosophical tradition maintains that language is necessary for genuinely conceptual thought. I argue that on a theoretically useful and empirically plausible concept of 'concept', it is necessary and sufficient for conceptual thought that a thinker be able to entertain many of the (...) potential thoughts produced by recombining her representational abilities apart from a direct confrontation with the states of affairs being represented. Such representational abilities support a cognitive engagement with the world that is flexible, abstract, and active. (shrink)