John McDowell’s ethical writings interpret ethical experience as intentional, socially-conditioned, virtuous responsiveness to situations and develop a modest account of practical rationality. His work converges with investigations of ethical experience by recent Kant scholars and Emmanuel Levinas. The Kantian interpreters and Levinas locate the categorical demands of ethical experience in rational agents’ demands for respect, while McDowell finds it in noble adherence to the demands of virtuous living. For McDowell, moral-practical rational efforts to justify ethics cannot transcend one’s form of (...) life and are motivated by desires to coerce others under a veneer of rationality or an unnecessary modern anxiety to protect community beliefs. He overlooks how such justifications can be motivated by a desire to give an account of one’s beliefs out of responsibility to others different from oneself, a responsibility elicited by others in ethical experience as depicted by the Kantian interpreters and Levinas. (shrink)

John McDowell’s ethical writings interpret ethical experience as intentional, socially-conditioned, virtuous responsiveness to situations and develop a modest account of practical rationality. His work converges with investigations of ethical experience by recent Kant scholars (Sherman, Brewer, Herman) and Emmanuel Levinas. The Kantian interpreters and Levinas locate the categorical demands of ethical experience in rational agents’ demands for respect, while McDowell finds it in noble adherence to the demands of virtuous living. For McDowell, moral-practical rational efforts to justify ethics cannot transcend (...) one’s form of life and are motivated by desires to coerce others under a veneer of rationality or an unnecessary modern anxiety to protect community beliefs. He overlooks how such justifications can be motivated by a desire to give an account of one’s beliefs out of responsibility to others different from oneself, a responsibility elicited by others in ethical experience as depicted by the Kantian interpreters and Levinas. (shrink)

John McDowell rejects the idea that non-conceptual content can rationally justify empirical claims—a task for which it is ill-fitted by its non-conceptual nature. This paper considers three possible objections to his views: he cannot distinguish empty conception from the perceptual experience of an object; perceptual discrimination outstrips the capacity of concepts to keep pace; and experience of the empirical world is more extensive than the conceptual focusing within it. While endorsing McDowell’s rejection of what he means by non-conceptual content, and (...) appreciating his insight into the experiential synthesis of intuition and conception (in particular, its role in grasping objects), I will argue that Edmund Husserl presents an even more comprehensive account of perceptual experience that explains how we experience the contribution of receptivity and sensibility and how they cooperate in perceptual discrimination. Further, it reveals “horizons”—a unique kind of contents, surplus content (rather than independent non-conceptual content)—beyond the synthesis of intuitive and conceptual contents through which objects are grasped. Such horizons play a constitutive role, making experience with its conceptual dimensions and justificatory potential possible; they in no way function like a bare given that is to fulfill some independent justificatory role. Whereas McDowell focuses on how experience does not take place in isolation from the exercise of conceptual capacities, Husserl complements his view by situating experience in a more encompassing whole and by elucidating the surplus-horizons that exceed the conceptual content of experience; play an inseparable, constitutive role within it; and indicate the limits of conceptual comprehension. (shrink)

The essence of Dussel's thought is presented through the concept of "ethical hermeneutics" which seeks to interpret reality from the viewpoint of what Emmanuel Levinas presents as the "other" - those who are vanquished, forgotten, or excluded from existent socio-political or cultural systems. Barber traces Dussel's development toward Levinas' philosophy through his discussion of the Hegelian dialectic and through the stages of Dussel's own ethical theory.

This essay describes some of the basic pragmatic tendencies at work in the world of working and then shows how the finite provinces of meaning of theoretical contemplation and literature act against those pragmatic tendencies. This analysis prepares the way to see how the religious province of meaning in a similar but also distinctive way acts back against these pragmatic tendencies. These three finite provinces of meaning make it possible to see the world from another center of orientation than that (...) of the ego agens and its proclivity to bring transcendences within reach, thereby freeing oneself to a degree from the fundamental anxiety and revealing the uniqueness of oneself and others, who are no longer subjected to working’s pragmatic imperatives. (shrink)

This book fully discusses Schutz's account of social reality and theory of motivation, including how his phenomenology casts the Marxian sociology of knowledge in a new light.

This article examines Richard Rorty's approach to the self in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity . In spite of their differing philosophical bases, Rorty and Emmanuel Levinas converge methodologically in their treatments of the self by avoiding paradigmatic notions of human nature and a philosophical project of justification. Although Rorty refuses to prioritize a moralist account of the self over its romanticist rivals, his presentation relies on the reader's response to the ethical appeal of the other as depicted by Levinas: Rorty (...) ultimately de-divinizes the moralist self on an ethical basis. Finally, a Levinasian approach would supplement Rorty's view of the self by manifesting: concern for victims of de-moralization, greater appreciation for philosophical rationality and justification, and acceptance of self-critically executed paternalistic interventions. In addition, Rorty's mistrust of universals converges with Kant's apprehension that ethical universalization could treat human beings as less than ends in themselves. Key Words: ethics • Immanuel Kant • Emmanuel Levinas • neopragmatism • phenomenology • postmodernity • psychology • Richard Rorty • the self • solidarity. (shrink)

Enrique Dussel's writings span the theology of liberation, critiques of discourse ethics, evaluations of Marx, Levinas, Habermas, and others, but most importantly, the development of a philosophy written from the underside of Eurocentric modernist teleologies, an ethics of the impoverished, and the articulation of a unique Latin American theoretical perspective. This anthology of original articles by U.S. philosophers elucidating Dussel's thought, offers critical analyses from a variety of perspectives, including feminist ones. Also included is an essay by Dussel that responds (...) to these essays. (shrink)

Stephen Darwall's The Second-Person Standpoint converges with Emmanuel Levinas's concern about the role of the second-person relationship in ethics. This paper contrasts their methodologies (regressive analysis of presuppositions versus phenomenology) to explain Darwall's narrower view of ethical experience in terms of expressed reactive attitudes. It delineates Darwall's overall justificatory strategy and the centrality of autonomy and reciprocity within it, in contrast to Levinas's emphasis on the experience of responsibility. Asymmetrical responsibility plays a more foundational role as a critical counterpoint to (...) 'mean-spirited' reciprocity than Darwall's laudable distinction between accountability and revenge, and responsibility even founds this distinction. The experience of being summoned to asymmetrical responsibility amplifies the meaning of 'authority', which is a presupposition for Darwall. Finally, asymmetrical responsibility helps develop decentred reasoning, invites risk beyond the boundaries of reciprocity at moments when autonomy appears endangered, reconciles respect and care at the experiential level, and presses to extend the scope of moral obligation. (shrink)

Richard Rorty challenges Jurgen Habermas's belief that validity-claims raised within context-bound discussions contain a moment of universality validity. Rorty argues that immersion within contingent languages prohibits any neutral, context-independent ground, that one cannot predict the defense of one's assertions before any audience, and that philosophy can no more escape its contextual limitations than strategic counterparts. Alfred Schutz's phenomenological account of motivation, the reciprocity of perspectives, and the theoretical province of meaning can articulate Habermas's intuitions.Since any claim can be analyzed from (...) an observer's perspective for its because-motives, it can always be shown to be context-related; but to the participant involved in the in-order-to project of establishing a claim's validity, the claim appears objectively valid until counter-evidence surfaces. Rorty, even when explaining what it is to make a truth claim, resorts to the observer perspective and omits reference to the in-order-to perspective, within which alone unconditional validity becomes visible. Furthermore, the expectation that one's claim is universally valid depends not on an empirical prediction that one''s claim can survive hypothesized future possible audiences. Rather, because of the reciprocity of perspectives, making possible communication and a common life, theoreticians assume that others will recognize what they take to be objective or valid, independently of diverse biographical circumstances. Finally, within the theoretical province requiring relevances different from those of everyday life, philosophy articulates claims with a greater potential to arrive at universal validity than projects that aim less universally, in spite of the fact that its theoretical context is always susceptible to because motive analysis. (shrink)

This book shows how, on the basis of a phenomenological account of knowledge, values, and intersubjectivity, Max Scheler defends the objective structure of being and value and the distinctiveness of the Other against mechanistic attempts to ...

Joachim Renn argues that Schutz fails to integrate two fundamental strands in his work: phenomenology and pragmatism. Gaps between separated consciousnesses block synchronization and access to others, and objective symbol schemes, absorbed within the egological outlook, cannot bridge these gaps. Renn, however, construes phenomenology as practicing a solipsistic withdrawal of a self cut off from its environs, denies that contents correlative to individual intentional acts can be objective and common, and overlooks the intricacies of Schutz’s descriptive methodology. Furthermore, for Renn, (...) Schutz’s distinctions between inner and outer time and ego and alter congeal into hardened dualisms. Renn expects more than Schutz’s methodology can deliver, but correctly points to problems of the social world that need to be addressed by several philosophical strategies, including pragmatism and Schutzian phenomenology. (shrink)

Dan Zahavi has questioned whether the use of a transcendental phenomenological epoché is essential for phenomenological psychology. He criticizes the views of Amedeo Giorgi by asserting that Husserl did not view the transcendental reduction as needed for an entrance into phenomenological psychology and that, if one thinks so, phenomenological psychology would be in danger of being absorbed within transcendental phenomenology. Thirdly, rather than envisioning transcendental phenomenology as a purification for phenomenological psychology, Zahavi recommends a dialogue between transcendental phenomenologists and psychologists. (...) However, the two disciplines are closer for Husserl who also conceives phenomenological psychology as a self-standing science, and Giorgi is not as rigid on the necessity of transcendental phenomenology for phenomenological psychology. Alfred Schutz, following Husserl’s “Nachwort,” develops his own distinctive phenomenological psychology that appreciates disciplinary convergences and respects boundaries, while also articulating a wider understanding of epoché as an anthropological fact operative beyond the limits of transcendental phenomenology. (shrink)

While Appiah and Soyinka criticize racial essentializing in Sartre and the Negritude poets, Sartre in Black Orpheus interprets the Negritudinists as employing a phenomenological, anamnestic retrieval of subjective experience. This retrieval uncovers two ethical attitudes: a less exploitative approach toward nature, and a conversion of slavery’s suffering into a stimulus for universal liberation. These attitudes spring from peasant cultural traditions and ethical responses to others’ race-based cruelty, rather than emanating from mystified ‘blackness’. Alfred Schutz’s because-motive analysis, a process of narrative (...) self-constitution, renders plausible these linkages the Negritudinists draw between themselves and peasant or slave ancestors. Such narratives, customarily constructed in common sense by European- and African-Americans, regularly involve mythic elements, serve laudable ethical purposes and require continual theoretical critique by anthropology, genetics and ethics. Theory, though, plays only a critical, corrective role for subjective, anamnestic recoveries of racial and ethnic identity, and it can never replace them. (shrink)

This paper supports Charles Siewert’s criticism of those criticizing first-person approaches because they disagree by arguing that such critics adopt a noncommittal, third-person observer standpoint on the debates themselves before recommending only third-person natural scientific approaches to mind and that they oversimplify when they portray philosophy as contentious and natural science as ruled by consensus. Further, a complete account of first-person intentionality in terms of acts and their correlative objects in their temporal and bodily interrelationships make it possible to defend (...) Siewert’s theses: that thought is phenomenally conscious, that there is a phenomenal consciousness beyond sensing, that the Protean view that equates change in a shape’s appearance with an apparent change in the shape of what appears is incorrect, and that Hume’s two-dimensional phenomenalism is mistaken. (shrink)

This paper argues that Husserl’s account of adult recognition of another allows for immediate, noninferential, analogical access to the other, though onedoes not experience the other’s experience as s/he does. The passive-associative processes at work in adult recognition of another make possible infant syncretic sociability and play a role in constituting the infant’s self prior to reflection. The reflective perspective of the psychologist and philosopher discovers that such infant experiences, though at first seeming indistinguishable from their parents’ experience, belong to (...) their own stream of consciousness and constitute a non-eliminable Cartesian residue and an inescapable solitude of identity. Finally new research in joint attention reveals that the infant self is constituted not only by passive experience but also by active movements evident in the infant’s attempt to shape the direction of adults in joint attention, however this may fall short of high-level reflection. (shrink)

John McDowell’s ethical writings interpret ethical experience as intentional, socially-conditioned, virtuous responsiveness to situations and develop a modest account of practical rationality. His work converges with investigations of ethical experience by recent Kant scholars and Emmanuel Levinas. The Kantian interpreters and Levinas locate the categorical demands of ethical experience in rational agents’ demands for respect, while McDowell finds it in noble adherence to the demands of virtuous living. For McDowell, moral-practical rational efforts to justify ethics cannot transcend one’s form of (...) life and are motivated by desires to coerce others under a veneer of rationality or an unnecessary modern anxiety to protect community beliefs. He overlooks how such justifications can be motivated by a desire to give an account of one’s beliefs out of responsibility to others different from oneself, a responsibility elicited by others in ethical experience as depicted by the Kantian interpreters and Levinas. (shrink)

Joachim Renn argues that Schutz fails to integrate two fundamental strands in his work: phenomenology and pragmatism. Gaps between separated consciousnesses block synchronization and access to others, and objective symbol schemes, absorbed within the egological outlook, cannot bridge these gaps. Renn, however, construes phenomenology as practicing a solipsistic withdrawal of a self cut off from its environs, denies that contents correlative to individual intentional acts can be objective and common, and overlooks the intricacies of Schutz's descriptive methodology. Furthermore, for Renn, (...) Schutz's distinctions between inner and outer time and ego and alter congeal into hardened dualisms. Renn expects more than Schutz's methodology can deliver, but correctly points to problems of the social world that need to be addressed by several philosophical strategies, including pragmatism and Schutzian phenomenology. (shrink)

Schutz’s manuscripts on Goethe’s novels show that he approached theological/metaphysical questions with seriousness and in a social-scientific rather than natural-theological vein. Temporality’s passage, issuing in the unintended consequences that intrigue social scientists and economists, opens onto intersubjective structures since the (subjective) meaning of an act for an actor may always be understood differently from another’s later, objective standpoint—even if the other is oneself understanding one’s earlier self. In this micro-level, pretheoretical, temporal/intersubjective matrix, life’s unforeseen, uncontrollable consequences prompt questions about fate. (...) Recognizing that present acts permit later re-interpretation by others is the origin of metaphysical speculation and, paradoxically, fallibilism. (shrink)

Despite Heinrich Popitz’s non-ideological, carefully descriptive account of how power is initiated and maintained, he too easily dismisses the Frankfurt School’s call for domination-free discourse as merely a subject for academic speculation. Because of his focus on the factual, Popitz neglects the possibility that ethical norms can challenge strategically-guided discourse even if only counterfactually. In addition, such norms are at work in the very discursive exchange represented by his writing his book for his readers and in that book’s aspiration to (...) universal validity claims that run counter to strategic interests that tend to be particularistic. Popitz’s own conviction that power does not completely suppress freedom provides at least a space in which claims can be advanced and evaluated independently of strategic imperatives. Perhaps because Popitz’s approach is limited to describing the functioning of power, the underlying philosophical anthropology of his work is Hobbesian insofar as agents seek to subject others to asymmetrical power relationships and insofar as even the recognition one gives to another aims at retrieving recognition for oneself. A counter-asymmetry is to be found in Emmanuel Levinas’s phenomenological descriptions of the ethical summons of the other which provide a philosophical backdrop against which power is exercised and in which the first event of the interpersonal encounter is peace, not war. (shrink)

In The Intentional Spectrum and Intersubjectivity Michael D. Barber is the first to bring phenomenology to bear not just on the perspectives of McDowell or Brandom alone, but on their intersection.