This is the most comprehensive book ever published on philosophical methodology. A team of thirty-eight of the world's leading philosophers present original essays on various aspects of how philosophy should be and is done. The first part is devoted to broad traditions and approaches to philosophical methodology. The entries in the second part address topics in philosophical methodology, such as intuitions, conceptual analysis, and transcendental arguments. The third part of the book is devoted to essays about the interconnections between philosophy (...) and neighbouring fields, including those of mathematics, psychology, literature and film, and neuroscience. (shrink)

This article examines the methodology of a core branch of contemporary political theory or philosophy: “analytic” political theory. After distinguishing political theory from related fields, such as political science, moral philosophy, and legal theory, the article discusses the analysis of political concepts. It then turns to the notions of principles and theories, as distinct from concepts, and reviews the methods of assessing such principles and theories (e.g., the reflective-equilibrium method), for the purpose of justifying or criticizing them. Finally, it looks (...) at a recent debate on how abstract and idealized political theory should be, and assesses the significance of disagreement in political theory. The discussion is carried out from an angle inspired by the philosophy of science. (shrink)

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. If we don't know what the words 'democracy' and 'democratic' mean, then we don't know what democracy is. This book defends a radical view: these words mean nothing and should be abandoned. The argument for Abolitionism is simple: those terms are defective (...) and we can easily do better, so let's get rid of them. According to the abolitionist, the switch to alternative devices would be a significant communicative, cognitive, and political advance. The first part of the book presents a general theory of abandonment: the conditions under which language should be abandoned. The rest of the book applies this general theory to the case of 'democracy' and 'democratic'. Cappelen shows that 'democracy' and 'democratic' are semantically, pragmatically, and communicatively defective. Abolitionism is not all gloom and doom. It also contains a message of good cheer: we have easy access to conceptual devices that are more effective than 'democracy'. We can do better. These alternative linguistic devices will enable us to ask better questions, provide genuinely fruitful answers, and have more rational discussions. Moreover, those questions and answers better articulate the communicative and cognitive aims of those who use empty terms like 'democracy' and 'democratic'. (shrink)

This book offers the first comprehensive critical study of David Hume¿s Four Dissertations of 1757, containing the Natural History of Religion, the Dissertation on the Passions, and the two essays Of Tragedy and Of the Standard of Taste. The author defends two important claims. The first is that these four works were not published together merely for convenience, but that they form a tightly integrated set, unified by the subject matter of the passions. The second is that the theory of (...) the passions they jointly present is significantly different¿indeed, significantly improved¿from that of the earlier Treatise. Most strikingly, it is anti-egoist and anti-hedonist about motivation, where the Treatise had espoused a Lockean hedonism and egoism. It is also more cognitivist in its analysis of the passions themselves, and demonstrates a greater awareness of the limits of sympathy and of the varieties of human taste. This book is an important contribution to the scholarly literature on Hume¿s work on the passions, art, and superstitious belief. (shrink)

Hume’s Dissertation on the Passions stands to Book 2 of his Treatise as the first and second Enquiries stand to Books 1 and 3 respectively. However, while the two Enquiries are evidently substantial reworkings of their Treatise ancestors, containing much that is different and new, the Dissertation appears to consist merely of superficially adapted excerpts from Treatise Book 2. I argue that this first impression is mistaken, by showing how Hume’s view of the indirect passions is modified in the later (...) work. In the Treatise, he views them as simple impressions; in the Dissertation, they are complex perceptions, part impression and part idea. I argue, furthermore, that Hume’s account of the origin of the indirect passions only works on this later view, and suggest that this is why he changed his mind. The Dissertation, I conclude, is an improvement on its Treatise forerunner, and not merely a précis of it. (shrink)

Barbara Herman argues for a radical shift in the way we perceive Kant's ethics. She convincingly reinterprets the key texts, at once allowing Kant to mean what he says while showing that what Kant says makes good moral sense. She urges us to abandon the tradition that describes Kantian ethics as a deontology, a moral system of rules of duty. She finds the central idea of Kantian ethics not in duty but in practical rationality as a norm of unconditioned (...) goodness. This book both clarifies Kant's own theory and adds programmatic vitality to modern moral philosophy. (shrink)

Herman Cappelen investigates how language and other representational devices can go wrong, and how to fix them. We use language to understand and talk about the world, but what if our language has deficiencies that prevent it from playing that role? How can we revise our concepts, and what are the limits on revision?

In our book The Inessential Indexical we argue that the various theses of essential indexicality all fail. Indexicals are not essential, we conclude. One essentiality thesis we target in the third chapter is the claim that indexical attitudes are essential for action. Our strategy is to give examples of what we call impersonal action rationalizations , which explain actions without citing indexical attitudes. To defeat the claim that indexical attitudes are essential for action, it suffices that there could be even (...) one successful impersonal action rationalization. In what follows we bolster our case against an essential connection between action and the de se (or indexicality), first by developing a range of new action models and secondly by responding to challenges from Dilip Ninan, Stephan Torre, and José Luis Bermúdez . (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Nietzsche's Socio‐Physiology and the Question of Sovereignty Nietzsche versus Liberalism on Freedom and Resistance Freedom and Resistance in Nietzsche's Later Thought On the Necessity of Conflict for Freedom: Nietzsche's Critique of the Subject.

The standard view of philosophical methodology is that philosophers rely on intuitions as evidence. Herman Cappelen argues that this claim is false: it is not true that philosophers rely extensively on intuitions as evidence. At worst, analytic philosophers are guilty of engaging in somewhat irresponsible use of 'intuition'-vocabulary. While this irresponsibility has had little effect on first order philosophy, it has fundamentally misled meta-philosophers: it has encouraged meta-philosophical pseudo-problems and misleading pictures of what philosophy is.

Contemporary society needs the recognition of a moral middle ground, where human behavior can be evaluated as permissible, understandable, or even valuable. As a counterforce to polarization and divisive politics, an identity model is proposed in which individual and group identities are transcended by a human and ecological identity.

This text contains contributions from two Kant conferences which took place in Leuven and Cerisy-la-Salle in 1993.

Cappelen and Hawthorne present a powerful critique of fashionable relativist accounts of truth, and the foundational ideas in semantics on which the new relativism draws. They argue compellingly that the contents of thought and talk are propositions that instantiate the fundamental monadic properties of truth and falsity.

_Insensitive Semantics_ is an overview of and contribution to the debates about how to accommodate context sensitivity within a theory of human communication, investigating the effects of context on communicative interaction and, as a corollary, what a context of utterance is and what it is to be in one. Provides detailed and wide-ranging overviews of the central positions and arguments surrounding contextualism Addresses broad and varied aspects of the distinction between the semantic and non-semantic content of language Defends a distinctive (...) and explanatorily powerful combination of semantic minimalism and speech act pluralism Confronts core problems which not only run to the heart of philosophy of language and linguistics, but which arise in epistemology, metaphysics, and moral philosophy as well. (shrink)

The principle with which Hume accounts for the seemingly unaccountable pleasure that we take in tragic drama is placed in its theoretical context, and the various metaphors that Hume uses in describing this principle are examined. These metaphors are then brought to bear on an interpretative controversy concerning the result of Hume's principle for the subordinate passion. It is argued that, while Hume's considered position should have been that this passion is destroyed at the end of the process, it is (...) most likely that Hume did not consider the question very carefully, so as to form a definite answer in his own mind. (shrink)

Nietzsche's strengths as a critic are widely acknowledged, but his peculiar style of critique is usually ignored as rhetoric, or dismissed as violent or simply incoherent. In this book, Nietzsche's concept of the agon or Wettkampf, a measured and productive form of conflict inspired by ancient Greek culture, is advanced as the dynamic and organising principle of his philosophical practice, enabling us to make sense of his critical confrontations and the much disputed concept of transvaluation or Umwertung. Agonal perspectives are (...) cast on a number of key problems in his thought across a broad range of texts. Topics and problems treated include: critical history and the need for a limit in the negation of the past; Nietzsche contra Socrates and the problem of closure; Nietzsche contra humanism and the problem of humanity; Nietzsche contra Kant on genius and legislation; the problem of self-legislation in relation to life and temporality; Nietzsche's sense of community in its articulation with law, and the normativity of taste; ressentiment and the question of therapy in Nietzsche and Freud; and the problem of total affirmation in relation to critique. (shrink)

Cappelen and Hawthorne present a powerful critique of fashionable relativist accounts of truth, and the foundational ideas in semantics on which the new relativism draws. They argue compellingly that the contents of thought and talk are propositions that instantiate the fundamental monadic properties of truth and falsity.

Making room for character -- Pluralism and the community of moral judgment -- A cosmopolitan kingdom of ends --Responsibility and moral competence --Can virtue be taught?: the problem of new moral facts -- Training to autonomy: Kant and the question of moral education -- Bootstrapping -- Rethinking Kant's hedonism -- The scope of moral requirement -- The will and its objects -- Obligatory ends -- Moral improvisation -- Contingency in obligation.

Overzicht van de discussies in Nederland in de twintigste eeuw over historisch besef, gevoerd vanuit verschillende wetenschappelijke disciplines en invalshoeken.

Interviews met Britse en Amerikaanse theologen die voorstanders zijn van de 'ecclesial turn': de wending naar de kerk als morele gemeenschap in een post-christelijke, geseculariseerde wereld.

The beginning of the twenty-first century saw something of a comeback for relativism within analytical philosophy. Relativism and Monadic Truth has three main goals. First, we wished to clarify what we take to be the key moving parts in the intellectual machinations of self-described relativists. Secondly, we aimed to expose fundamental flaws in those argumentative strategies that drive the pro-relativist movement and precursors from which they draw inspiration. Thirdly, we hoped that our polemic would serve as an indirect defence of (...) a traditional and natural picture concerning truth. According to this picture, what we call ‘Simplicity’, the fundamental structure of semantic reality is best revealed by construing truth as a simple monadic property of propositions that serve as the objects of belief, assertion, meaning and agreement. Our project was not a straightforward one. So-called relativists are not uniform in their key ideology, are often sloppy, casual, obscure or confused in their self-characterization, and differ in their argumentative emphasis among themselves and over time, thereby presenting a target that is both amorphous and shifty. This is an area where parties will frequently claim not to understand each other and where certain parties will sometimes accuse others of failing to make any sense at all. In such a situation, any effort to impose order will inevitably strike some parties as tendentious and unfair. That said, we felt that we had enough of …. (shrink)

I call the activity of assessing and developing improvements of our representational devices ‘conceptual engineering’.¹ The aim of this chapter is to present an argument for why conceptual engineering is important for all parts of philosophy (and, more generally, all inquiry). Section I of the chapter provides some background and defines key terms. Section II presents the argument. Section III responds to seven objections. The replies also serve to develop the argument and clarify what conceptual engineering is.

Thinking and being -- Being and becoming -- Becoming and acting.

Throughout the twentieth century, scholars, artists and politicians have accused each other of "historicism." But what exactly did this mean? Judging by existing scholarship, the answers varied enormously. Like many other "isms," historicism could mean nearly everything, to the point of becoming meaningless. Yet the questions remain: What made generations of scholars throughout the humanities and social sciences worry about historicism? Why did even musicians and members of parliament warn against historicism? And what explains this remarkable career of the term (...) across generations, fields, regions, and languages? Focusing on the "travels" that historicism made, this volume uses historicism as a prism for exploring connections between disciplines and intellectual traditions usually studied in isolation from each other. It shows how generations of sociologists, theologians, and historians tried to avoid pitfalls associated with historicism and explains why the term was heavily charged with emotions like anxiety, anger, and worry. While offering fresh interpretations of classic authors such as Friedrich Meinecke, Karl Löwith, and Leo Strauss, this volume highlights how historicism took on new meanings, connotations, and emotional baggage in the course of its travels through time and place. (shrink)

De theoloog Herman Bavinck (1854-1921) was van 1883-1902 aan de Theologische School te Kampen niet alleen verantwoordelijk voor het onderwijs in de dogmatiek, maar ook in dat van de ethiek. In deze uitgave worden drie niet eerder gepubliceerde manuscripten van Bavinck uitgegeven, die geheel of gedeeltelijk aan de filosofische ethiek zijn gewijd. In combinatie met Bavincks in 2019 verschenen Gereformeerde Ethiek biedt dit boek een representatief (en wellicht zelfs compleet) overzicht van de wijze waarop theologiestudenten in de laatste twee (...) decennia van de negentiende eeuw in Kampen wegwijs werden gemaakt in de ethiek. (shrink)