Inhalt: Michael Albrecht: Zum Wortgebrauch von 'Aufklarung' bei Johann Joachim Spalding. Mit einer Bibliographie der Schriften und zwei ungedruckten Voten Spaldings - Bruno Bianco: Schulbegriff und Weltbegriff der Philosophie in der Wiener Logik. Ein Beitrag zum Verstandnis von Kants Philosophie- und Wissenschaftsbegriff - Luigi Cataldi Madonna: Theorie und Kritik der Vernunft bei Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz - Claudio Cesa: Reformation statt Aufklarung. Hegel uber Friedrich den Grossen - George di Giovanni: Rehberg, Reinhold und C. C. E. Schmid uber Kant und (...) die moralische Freiheit - Jean Ecole: Christian Wolffs Metaphysik und die Scholastik - Gunter Gawlick: Theodizee fur den Alltag. Bemerkungen zur Rezeption von A. A. Sarasas Ars semper gaudendi in der deutschen Aufklarung - Volker Gerhardt: Prolegomena zum Begriff der Individualitat - Hansmichael Hohenegger: Der Weg der Wissenschaft und die Arbeitsteilung in der Philosophie. Zur Rolle der Teleologie in Kants Philosophieauffassung - Gerd Irrlitz: Antinomik bei Kant und was er von deren Aufklarung erwartete - Fumiyasu Ishikawa: Die 'ungesellige Geselligkeit' der Vernunftkritik. Kant als Polemiker - Soo Bae Kim: Ethik als Kasuistik. Kants Antwort auf die Garvesche Kritik - Lothar Kreimendahl: Hat Hume William Kings 'De origine mali' gelesen? Die Notizen zur Theodizee in den 'Early Memoranda' und ihre Quelle - Silvestro Marcucci: Kant, Gustav von Starck und die 'pythagorischen Ternen' - Pietro Pimpinella: 'Cognitio intuitiva' bei Wolff und Baumgarten - Horst Schropfer: Ludwig Martin Trager - ein fruher Anhanger der philosophischen Ideen und Bestrebungen Immanuel Kants - Clemens Schwaiger: Vollkommenheit als Moralprinzip bei Wolff, Baumgarten und Kant - Rainer Specht: John Lockes Lehre vom Allgemeinen - Katrin Tenenbaum: 'Was ist der Mensch?' Mannliche Universalitat und weibliche Partikularitat in der Anthropologie Kants - Robert Theis: Gottes Spur in der Welt? Kant uber den Optimismus um die Mitte der 1750er Jahre - Maria Jesus Vazquez Lobeiras: Kants Logik zwischen Tradition und Innovation - Verzeichnis der Schriften Norbert Hinskes. (shrink)

In 1997 the Tenth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that school officials at West High School did not violate Rachel Bauchman's constitutional rights by including Christian religious music as part of its curriculum, or by staging school performances at religious sites. Three philosophical questions are investigated in this paper: whether the performance of religious text constitutes a religious practice, the ways in which instructional and performance context can affect the performance of sacred music, and how music teachers can avoid (...) coercion when teaching religious music. Conclusions suggest that music educators must carefully consider the historical and cultural context of texts utilized in choral music. Certain contemporary devotional texts intended primarily for worship may prove problematic in a classroom setting. In addition, the instructional context in which religious music is presented can greatly impact how students understand the music's significance. Music educators should carefully articulate clear pedagogical reasons for staging performances in houses of worship to avoid the appearance of endorsement, and should refrain from asking students to participate in organized worship services. Finally, music educators should be sensitive to the problems religious texts present to individual students, taking responsibility for facilitating a classroom environment that respects a diversity of viewpoints. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction McDowell Sellars and McDowell: Convergence Sellars and McDowell: Divergence Above the Line …and Below It Philosophy and Modern Science Notes References.

Skepticism has been (and remains) a central concern of the theory of knowledge. Indeed, some philosophers think that, without the problem of skepticism, we would not know what to make of the idea of distinctively philosophical theories of knowledge. However, a philosopher who thinks along these lines is likely to have in mind a rather special form of skepticism. Let us call it philosophical skepticism. Philosophical skepticism has a long history. Indeed, it is almost coeval with systematic philosophy itself.

Inspired by the work of Wilfrid Sellars, Michael Williams launches an all-out attack on what he calls "phenomenalism," the idea that our knowledge of the world rests on a perceptual or experiential foundation. The point of this wider-than-normal usage of the term "phenomenalism," according to which even some forms of direct realism deserve to be called phenomenalistic, is to call attention to important continuities of thought between theories often thought to be competitors. Williams's target is not phenomenalism in its (...) classical sense-datum and reductionist form but empiricism generally. Williams examines and rejects the idea that, unless our beliefs are answerable to a "given" element in experience, objective knowledge will be impossible. Groundless Belief was first published in 1977. This second edition contains a new afterword in which Williams places his arguments in the context of some current discussions of coherentism versus the Myth of the Given and explains their relation to subsequent developments in his own epistemological views. (shrink)

This article will continue Jose Medina's work on “resistant imaginations” by developing the concepts of “internal resistant imagination” and “external resistant imagination” through readings of Assata Shakur's and Mamphela Ramphele's autobiographies. By introducing the problem of location and its relation to race it will show that one's geographical location affects their location in relation to hegemonic imaginations. This in turn requires different strategies of resistance. Using Medina's work this article will argue that Shakur and Ramphele explore these two different avenues (...) for undoing harmful truths within racist and sexist hegemonic imaginaries. (shrink)

On the standard reading of On Certainty, Wittgenstein’s fundamental idea is that primitive certainty is categorially distinct from knowledge. Since primitive certainties shape our understanding of doubt or justification, our relation to such certainties is necessarily non-epistemic: they cannot be things we know. This ‘Wittgensteinian’ perspective on knowledge and certainty has come to be known as “hinge epistemology, after one of Wittgenstein’s striking metaphors: “The questions that we raise and our doubts depend on the fact that some propositions are not (...) doubted, are as it were like hinges on which those turn.” Wittgenstein is not a hinge epistemologist. Far from being arational commitments, basic certainties are basic knowledge, on an “infallibilist” conception of knowledge. To see how these ideas can be made to work, we must recognize that knowledge and doubt are deeply circumstance-dependent. (shrink)

Recent studies of Aristotle’s meteorology have often focused on questions of scientific methodology rather than on the empirical accuracy of the explanations. Here we wish to focus on Aristotle’s theory of storms, considering them in their historical context and in light of Aristotle’s theoretical commitments, but testing them in terms of their ability to explain the phenomena in question. Aristotle’s approach to storm events follows a general pattern of “outburst” theories proposed by Presocratic thinkers, in which wind, fire, and the (...) like burst out of clouds. Aristotle proposes a two-exhalation theory in which a dry and a moist gas arise by evaporation and can conflict with each other. In Meteorologica II.9 and III.1, he provides his own theory of storms. Modern accounts are hampered by a mistranslation of ‘eknephias’ as “hurricane.” We argue that an eknephias is never a hurricane, but in the first place a theoretical construct meant to account for three distinct phenomena: tuphōn, keraunos, and prēstēr, all of which need to be identified more clearly with actual meteorological phenomena than they have been. We identify appropriate phenomena and also propose a phenomenon corresponding to eknephias, which makes sense of Aristotle’s account. (shrink)

The classical traditions of Vedānta in India explored the problem of why an omnipotent being like God would permit sentient beings to suffer in His creation. This article explores the solution provided to the problem of suffering by the sixteenth-century philosopher Vyāsatīrtha. Vyāsatīrtha argued that there is a satisfying explanation of why God would permit suffering to both exist and to be unevenly distributed among the individual souls trapped in transmigratory existence. He claims that we can only reconcile the idea (...) of an independent, omnipotent God with the existence of suffering by assuming that God’s treatment of the individual souls is based primarily in their eternal, immutable ethical natures and not purely on their conduct/karma as some earlier philosophers suggested. The article is based on original translations of the passages in the Tātparyacandrikā where Vyāsatīrtha makes these arguments against his Advaita and Viśiṣṭādvaita opponents. (shrink)

In this article, I explore the encounter of the Mādhva philosopher Vyāsatīrtha with the works of the Navya-Naiyāyika Gaṅgeśa Upādhyāya. The article is based on original translations of passages from Vyāsatīrtha’s Nyāyāmr̥ta and Tarkatāṇḍava. Philosophically, the article focuses on the issue of empty-terms/nonexistent entities, particularly in the context of the theory of inference. I begin by outlining the origin of the Mādhva and Nyāya positions about these issues in their respective analyses of perceptual illusion. I then contrast the role of (...) Gaṅgeśa’s thought in the Nyāyāmr̥ta and Tarkatāṇḍava and show how Vyāsatīrtha responds to Gaṅgeśa’s ideas in different ways in those texts. I conclude with a discussion of how Vyāsatīrtha defends the Mādhva theory of “substrate-free” qualities against Gaṅgeśa in order to show that we can think and make valid inferences about nonexistent things. (shrink)

Across the globe, radical conservative political forces and ideas are influencing and even transforming the landscape of international politics. Yet IR is remarkably ill-equipped to understand and engage these new challenges. Unlike political theory or domestic political analyses, conservatism has no distinctive place in the fields’ defining alternatives of realism, liberalism, Marxism, and constructivism. This paper seeks to provide a point of entry for such engagement by bringing together what may seem the most unlikely of partners: critical theory and the (...) New Right. Important parts of today’s New Right represent self-conscious appropriations of Critical themes and thinkers—turning them to self-declared “reactionary” ends. Developing outside the confines of the academy, these forms of thought have woven insights from across Critical theory into new and mobilizing forms of conservative ideology, seeking to link that ideology to social forces that play increasingly active roles in global politics. Our intention here is not to somehow blame Critical perspectives for the ideas of the New Right, either directly or by association. Rather, we seek to show how an engagement with Critical theory helps us understand the New Right, while also demonstrating some of the direct challenges the New Right poses for critical perspectives. (shrink)

Austin is not much in fashion these days. In Austin’s Way with Skepticism, Mark Kaplan swims against the current, arguing that Austin still has much to teach us about how to do epistemology. Methodologically, Austin’s insistence on fidelity to ordinary ways of talking about knowledge is a non-negotiable constraint on epistemological theorizing. Substantively, Austin has important things to say about knowledge. But while I am fully in accord with the spirit of Kaplan’s enterprise, I take Austin to occupy a more (...) radical position: that getting the linguistic facts straight should lead us to call into question the very idea of a theory of knowledge, at least as ‘theory of knowledge’ has traditionally been understood. (shrink)

In Unnatural Doubts, Michael Williams constructs a masterly polemic against the very idea of epistemology, as traditionally conceived.

In this exciting and original introduction to epistemology, Michael Williams explains and criticizes traditional philosophical theories of the nature, limits, methods, possibility, and value of knowing. All the main contemporary perspectives are explored and questioned, and the author's own theories put forward, making this new book essential reading for anyone, beginner or specialist, concerned with the philosophy of knowledge.

Use of rhetorical figures has been an element of persuasive speech at least since Gorgias of Leontini, for whom such deliberate deviations from ordinary literal language were a defining feature of what he called the ‘psychagogic art’. But must we consider figures of speech limited to an ornamental and merely stylistic function, as some ancient and still many modern theorists suggest? Not according to contemporary cognitive rhetoric, which proposes that figures of speech can play a fundamentally argumentative role in speech (...) by evoking a level of shared meaning between speaker and listener, and simultaneously by affording the possibility of reorganizing this common ground. This paper argues that, in Latin literature, zeugma—the ‘linking together’ of two elements with a third that is semantically compatible with only one of them—can and very often does operate argumentatively, and that it does so by surfacing figurative relationships that normally remain below the conscious awareness of Latin speakers and by imparting a certain structure to these relationships. What very often motivates the selection of elements within zeugma—and what makes zeugma more than simply a stylistic device—are in fact metaphorical structures that are highly conventionalized in Latin's semantic system. In tapping into symbolic associations that are deeply entrenched in the language and thought of Latin speakers, zeugma therefore provided a ready-made device for constructing arguments in context. (shrink)

Inspired by the work of Wilfrid Sellars, Michael Williams launches an all-out attack on what he calls "phenomenalism," the idea that our knowledge of the world rests on a perceptual or experiential foundation.

Nuno Venturinha holds that the contextualist epistemology adumbrated in Wittgenstein’s On Certainty--the most powerful response to philosophical skepticism yet developed-- falls short of providing a complete answer to Cartesian radical skepticism about knowledge of the external world. I argue that Venturinha underestimates the range and complexity of Wittgenstein’s epistemological. He does so because he reads Wittgenstein along the lines of so-called ‘hinge epistemology’. Hinge epistemology indeed fails as a diagnosis of skepticism. But it also fails as a reading of Wittgenstein. (...) A more adequate understanding of Wittgenstein suggests that Venturinha’s pessimistic conclusion can be avoided. (shrink)

In What Is Literature? Sartre claims, "One does not write for slaves."1 This takes place in the context of an argument Sartre makes in claiming literature is an appeal to the freedom of others.2 Furthermore, the acts of reading and writing are collaborative occasions that invent and re-invent the world by disclosing it and creating it.3 It is important to be precise about what Sartre believes must be presupposed in order for literature to function. The force of committed literature is (...) not propaganda that attempts to control the reader; it only comes about from the a priori existence of free subjects. Thus, Sartre notes, "The book does not serve my freedom; it requires it. Indeed, one cannot address oneself to... (shrink)

Realism is commonly portrayed as theory that reduces international relations to pure power politics. Michael Williams provides an important reexamination of the Realist tradition and its relevance for contemporary international relations. Examining three thinkers commonly invoked as Realism's foremost proponents - Hobbes, Rousseau, and Morgenthau - the book shows that, far from advocating a crude realpolitik, Realism's most famous classical proponents actually stressed the need for a restrained exercise of power and a politics with ethics at its core. These (...) ideas are more relevant than ever at a time when the nature of responsible responses to international problems are at the centre of contemporary political debate. This original interpretation of major thinkers will interest scholars of international relations and the history of ideas. (shrink)

Genia Schönbaumsfeld argues that Cartesian skepticism is an illusion induced by the “Cartesian Picture” of perceptual knowledge, in which knowledge of the “external world” depends on an inference from how things subjectively seem to one to how they actually are. To show its incoherence, she draws on the work of John McDowell, which she sees as elaborating a central theme from Wittgenstein’s On Certainty. I argue that Cartesian skepticism is not an illusion, as Schönbaumsfeld understands ‘illusion’, and that McDowell’s account (...) of perceptual knowledge is both untenable and incompatible with Wittgenstein’s ideas about knowledge. Schönbaumsfeld thinks that, to understand how perception can engender knowledge of the world, we need a non-Cartesian account of perceptual reasons. Wittgenstein offers a much more radical break with the Cartesian Picture: an account of knowledge without ‘experience’. (shrink)

This article focuses on the French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s thought in the 1960s. Though the discourse of the ‘death of man’ was regnant among French avant-garde intellectuals, this article argues that Derrida himself has to be described as a humanist at this stage in his career, even if a reluctant one. The case is made through close textual analysis of three of Derrida’s early and seminal works: ‘Cogito and the History of Madness’ (1963), ‘Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the (...) Thought of Emmanuel Levinas’ (1964) and ‘The Ends of Man’ (1968). In these texts, Derrida grapples with issues of the subject and the other. They collectively reveal that the Derrida of the 1960s held fast to the view that philosophical thought could neither dispense with the subject nor escape the horizon of humanism. However, Derrida reconceived the human subject with reference to his core concepts of différance and arche-writing, making for an aporetic humanism that deconstructs the binary of humanism–antihumanism. (shrink)

This book examines in detail two of the fundamental questions raised by quantum mechanics. First, is the world indeterministic? Second, are there connections between spatially separated objects? In the first part, the author examines several interpretations, focusing on how each proposes to solve the measurement problem and on how each treats probability. In the second part, the relationship between probability (specifically determinism and indeterminism) and non-locality is examined, and it is argued that there is a non-trivial relationship between probability and (...) non-locality. The author then re-examines some of the interpretations of part one of the book in the light of this argument, and considers how they fare with regard to locality and Lorentz invariance. The book will appeal to anyone with an interest in the interpretation of quantum mechanics, including researchers in the philosophy of physics and theoretical physics, as well as graduate students in those fields. (shrink)

‘Responsibilist' approaches to epistemology link knowledge and justification with epistemically responsible belief management, where responsible management is understood to involve an essential element of guidance by recognized epistemic norms. By contrast, reliabilist approaches stress the de facto reliability of cognitive processes, rendering epistemic self-consciousness as inessential. I argue that, although an adequate understanding of human knowledge must make room for both responsibility and reliability, philosophers have had a hard time putting them together, largely owing to a tendency, on the part (...) of responsibilists, to adopt an overly demanding, hyperintellectualized conception of what epistemic responsibility demands. I trace this tendency towards hyper-intellectualism to a wish to meet scepticism head on, a wish that enforces adherence to a particular model of the structure of epistemic justification. I argue that a more humanly reasonable conception of epistemic justification suggests an alternative model. With this model in hand, we can both deflect sceptical problems and combine responsibility with reliability in a satisfying way. Philosophical Papers Vol. 37 (1) 2008: pp. 1-26. (shrink)

This article distinguishes Wittgensteinian contextualism from epistemic relativism. The latter involves the view that a belief ’s status as justified depends on the believer’s epistemic system, as well as the view that no system is superior to another. It emerges from the thought that we must rely, circularly, on our epistemic system to determine whether any belief is justified. Contextualism, by contrast, emerges from the thought that we need not answer a skeptical challenge to a belief unless there is good (...) reason to doubt the belief; so we need not rely on our epistemic system to determine whether a belief is justified. Accordingly contextualism is not committed to the view that a belief ’s status depends on the believer’s epistemic system, nor to the view that no system is superior to another. The contextualist is not committed to epistemic relativism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Review of Stephen Phillips' Jewel of Reflection on the Truth about Epistemology:A Complete and Annotated Translation of the Tattva-cintā-maṇiMichael Williams (bio)Stephen Phillips presents a translation and commentary on Gaṅgeśa Upādhyāya's Tattvacintāmaṇi, which is widely regarded as the foundational text of the Navya-Nyāya tradition. The importance of Gaṅgeśa's work to subsequent philosophy in India can hardly be overstated. In the centuries after his death, countless commentaries and dissertations were written (...) on the Tattvacintāmaṇi by Nyāya scholars in Mithila and Bengal. Recent [End Page 510] scholarship (David and Duquette 2021) has highlighted how the work of the Navya-Naiyāyikas came to influence intellectuals from all over the Indian subcontinent. The theories of Gaṅgeśa and his followers shaped discussions in diverse scientific fields, including Vedānta, Mīmāṃsā, grammatical science, and literary theory.Despite its pervasive impact on Indian thought, Navya-Nyāya has frequently been portrayed in a negative light by scholars. The Indologist Arthur Berriedale Keith (1921, p. 35) described the commentaries on Gaṅgeśa's work as "a vast mass of perverted ingenuity worthy of the most flourishing days of mediaeval scholasticism." Meanwhile, Swami Vivekananda bemoaned the "never ending Avacchinnas and Avacchedakas" of Navya-Nyāya prose.1Jonardon Ganeri (2011) has discussed how these negative stereotypes reach back to the political agenda of the British colonial government in India during the nineteenth century, and his work highlights the vitality and diversity of the discussion of metaphysics in the Bengali tradition of Navya-Nyāya. Nevertheless, there is no denying that much Navya-Nyāya work is extremely difficult to discuss and translate comprehensibly. Many scholars still think of Navya-Nyāya works as untranslatable, at least in the sense that their meaning could not be effectively communicated to a modern audience who are not already deeply familiar with the tradition. This would be tragic, given the potential of Navya-Nyāya philosophy to contribute to the growing cross-cultural conversation in philosophy.Phillips is the first scholar to translate the entire Tattvacintāmaṇi into another language. His work attempts to communicate the foundational text of the Navya-Nyāya tradition to a broad audience. In his introduction, Phillips says that his work aims to speak to analytic philosophers, Sanskritists, and "specialists whose interests span issues in contemporary philosophy and Gaṅgeśa's achievements" (2020, vol. 1, p. 1). Phillips worked with the late Ramanuja Tatacharya to read the Tattvacintāmaṇi's chapters on perception and inference. Tatacharya was recognized as one of the leading experts on Navya-Nyāya philosophy in the world during his lifetime, and Phillips' translation distils many of his insights into the text.Phillips' goal is to translate the Tattvacintāmaṇi into lucid English. He eschews what he terms the "error of literalism" (2020, 1:xvi), instead using idiomatic translations that draw on concepts from contemporary analytic philosophy. Unlike Daniel Ingalls (1951) and Cornelius Goekoop (1967), Phillips uses formalization in Property Predicate Logic comparatively rarely, deploying it selectively in contexts such as the discussion of the nature of pervasion (the Vyāptivāda) and the discussion of the "inferential undercutter" (the Upādhivāda), for instance. The introduction to the work is extremely clear and explains the translation using terms of modern analytic philosophy. Phillips presents a perspicuous introduction to the theory of inference, [End Page 511] which is necessary to understanding Gaṅgeśa's work, which constantly employs inferential arguments.Phillips' introductions to the individual chapters of the text are also very illuminating, and often contain original insights into the philosophy of the Tattvacintāmaṇi. For instance, his introduction to the Īśvaravāda argues, contra John Vattanky ([1989] 2011), that Gaṅgeśa himself was not entirely persuaded of the strength of the proofs for the existence of god (īśvara) that he puts forward in that chapter. Phillips argues that Gaṅgeśa may actually have sympathized to some extent with the Mīmāṃsā views he ultimately critiques there, detecting on Gaṅgeśa's part a "sympathy for certain atheistic... (shrink)