In a rigorous exploration of how secularism and identity emerged as conflicting concepts in the modern world, Akeel Bilgrami elaborates a notion of secular enchantment with a view to finding in secular modernity a locus of meaning and value, while addressing squarely the anxiety that all such notions are exercises in nostalgia.

Once this integrated position is fully in place, the book closes with a postscript on how one might fruitfully view the kind of self-knowledge that is pursued ...

Belief and Meaning is a philosophical treatment of intentionality. It offers an original, logical and convincing account of intentional content which is local and contextual and which takes issues with standard theories of meaning.

The paper discusses the issue whether or not value may be seen as being in the world, thus opening the dialog between analytic tradition and authors like Marx and Heidegger, and reviving some important issues prominent in the work of John McDowell. It stresses the deep connections that exist between value and agency and a certain conception of the perceptible world which we inhabit as agents. It argues that it would be no bad thing for analytic philosophers, who are engaged (...) with issues of naturalism, to allow themselves to be mobilized by broader terms that Weber and Marx deployed such as ‘disenchantment’ and ‘commodification’ and ‘alienation’ in order to undertand our unease with the narrow and “thin” variant of rationality, characteristic of science. (shrink)

In Self-Knowledge and Resentment, Akeel Bilgrami argues that self-knowledge of our intentional states is special among all the knowledges we have because it is not an epistemological notion in the standard sense of that term, but instead is a fallout of the radically normative nature of thought and agency. Four themes or questions are brought together into an integrated philosophical position: What makes self-knowledge different from other forms of knowledge? What makes for freedom and agency in a deterministic universe? What (...) makes intentional states of a subject irreducible to its physical and functional states? And what makes values irreducible to the states of nature as the natural sciences study them? This integration of themes into a single and systematic picture of thought, value, agency, and self-knowledge is essential to the book's aspiration and argument. Once this integrated position is fully in place, the book closes with a postscript on how one might fruitfully view the kind of self-knowledge that is pursued in psychoanalysis. (shrink)

In these seventeen essays, distinguished senior scholars discuss the conceptual issues surrounding the idea of freedom of inquiry and scrutinize a variety of obstacles to such inquiry that they have encountered in their personal and professional experience. Their discussion of threats to freedom traverses a wide disciplinary and institutional, political and economic range covering specific restrictions linked to speech codes, the interests of donors, institutional review board licensing, political pressure groups, and government policy, as well as phenomena of high generality, (...) such as intellectual orthodoxy, in which coercion is barely visible and often self-imposed. As the editors say in their introduction: "No freedom can be taken for granted, even in the most well-functioning of formal democracies. Exposing the tendencies that undermine freedom of inquiry and their hidden sources and widespread implications is in itself an exercise in and for democracy.". (shrink)

Mill’s famous meta-inductive argument for freedom of speech claims that the adoption of norms of freedom and tolerance exposes our convictions to dissent and falsification and thus makes progress towards truth possible. It also claims that this is an argument accessible to any person capable of inductive rationality, while not appealing to any substantive value. The paper will question both these claims and show that the argument is much weaker than generally thought. The argument turns on exposing an incompatibility between (...) an implicit assumption of Mill’s argument that truth is a goal of inquiry that is worth pursuing and his explicit fallibilist claim that we can never be sure that we have achieved the truth in our inquiry. (shrink)

This essay provided a summary of my book, _Belief and Meaning, showing how I thought that it was possible to combine a view of intentional content that was externalist as well as one which keeps faith with Frege's constraint raised by his puzzle about identity and Kripke's puzzle about belief. The account criticizes current externalist accounts owing to Putnam, Burge, McDowell and Davidson. A great deal turns on meaning and intentional content being contextual in a way that the book elaborates.

Based on presentations at a conference in Varanasi, 2008.

Gandhi expressed opposition to the Enlightenment and even to science. His view is best understood in the context of a radical critique of a certain orthodoxy that emerged after the Enlightenment. That orthodoxy insists that we take a detached, impersonal standpoint in relation to nature. By contrast, Gandhi and his forebears in the radical enlightenment see nature as suffused with value, and allow us to approach nature from the first-person point of view.

This book brings together essays that individually and as a whole present a detailed and rigorous multidisciplinary exploration of the concept of nature and its wider ethical and political implications. The essays together present a revaluation of the natural world with a view to addressing some of the fundamental concerns of our time.

This chapter contains sections titled: Abstract Introduction Tolerance and Blasphemy Muslim Identity and Internal Reasons Liberal Pluralism References.

This paper provides a detailed account of the normal importance of self-knowledge. I critique two previous accounts, one developed by Bilgrami and the other inspired by Putnam. It is argued that the former conflates self-beliefs with the intentional states that these higher-order beliefs are about, whereas the latter shows only that true beliefs of certain kinds—as opposed to true self-beliefs simpliciter—improve our chances of survival. Self-knowledge is valuable for four reasons. First, it improves our chances of survival because it enables (...) us to assess our intentional states and adjust our behavior. Second, it plays a critical role in effecting cooperation because the efficient pursuit of common goals requires that one communicate to others information about one’s beliefs and desires. Third, it provides protection against psychopathologies such as anxiety and narcissism because it enables the agent to assume responsibility for his thoughts and actions. Fourth, it enhances the agent’s self-confidence and happiness because the less he doubts that his successes are the result of his acting on his attitudes and abilities, the more self-confident and happier he is. I conclude with a discussion of the disadvantages of self-knowledge and the advantages of self-ignorance and self-error. (shrink)

Is a devoted Nazi or a zombie bureaucrat a greater moral and political problem? Because the dangers of immoral fanaticism are so clear, the dangers of mindless bureaucracy are easy to overlook. Yet zombie bureaucrats have contributed substantially to the greatest catastrophes of the 20th century, doing so seemingly oblivious to the monstrous qualities of their actions. Hannah Arendt’s work on thoughtlessness raises a dilemma: if Eichmann, the architect of the Nazi Final Solution, truly was a thoughtless ‘cog’, lacking in (...) intentionality, can one really hold him morally accountable for the evil qualities of his acts? This article relates Arendt’s ‘thought’ and Strawson’s and Bilgrami’s discussion of ‘reactive attitudes’ and Sartre’s concept of ‘bad faith’. To find a basis for moral accountable in seemingly thoughtless cases like Eichmann’s. Although Arendt’s Eichmann is an extreme example, finding a basis to hold him accountable is valuable because ‘little Eichmanns’ will persist as long as impersonal forces structure and depress reactive attitudes. (shrink)

The philosopher Akeel Bilgrami’s notion of identity is original and challenging to liberal political theory, but still largely unaddressed by it. In a nutshell, Bilgrami characterizes identity as holding certain values and commitments with a crucial addendum: as we want to continue living by those values and commitments in the future, we erect some social and legal barriers to prevent them from change. Liberals of a Millian and/or Rawlsian cast of mind, in turn, arrange political institutions to enable such change, (...) as they assume that we are the kind of creatures that change their minds. In this sense, the identitarian and the liberal mindset are, as the philosopher claims, “mirror opposites”. This article engages with Bilgrami’s view in two senses: on the one hand, it highlights some potentially problematic areas that may call for further clarification and reinterpretation of the liberal canon, as well as offering other set of tensions that arise with non-liberal philosophical traditions. On the other hand, it contends that Bilgrami’s ultimate claim is not merely that the identitarian mindset is more rational than the liberal mentality, as he does, but that it makes political demands that should be assessed against the liberal ideal of justification. While it may be the case that identitarianism is rationally superior to certain versions of comprehensive liberalism, the paper concludes that it loses out to political liberalism, to the extent that Bilgrami’s identitarianism is willing to display the state’s coercive muscle in oppressive ways, in a way that political liberalism does not. (shrink)

Introduction In this essay, I will provide an overview of Akeel Bilgrami's model of negotiated-emergent secularism. Although in the conclusion of my essay I will put forward some critical comments, I believe that Bilgrami's thesis, as well as the underlying philosophical and moral-psychological theory, deserves attention as an interesting and important contribution to the intensifying debates on secularism.Bilgrami's goal in proposing the model of emergent-negotiated secularism is twofold. On the one hand, he intends to work out a position that would (...) permit an inclusivist attitude toward citizens whom he describes as religious illiberal moderates. He states that this model…. (shrink)

ResumenEl propósito de este artículo es defender que el externismo social de Burge puede enfrentarse con éxito al trilema de Bilgrami, un argumento que pretende mostrar la incompatibilidad entre el externismo ortodoxo, dentro del cual figura el externismo de Burge, y el acceso privilegiado a los propios contenidos mentales. Además, pretendemos poner de manifiesto la existencia de ciertas tensiones en la versión del externismo defendida por Bilgrami.Palabras claveAtribuciones conceptuales, contenido psicológico, internismo, externismoAbstractThe aim of this paper is to defend that (...) Burge’s social externalism can successfully face Bilgrami’s trilemma, an argument that intends to show the incompatibility between orthodox externalism, in which Burge’s externalism is featured, and the privileged access to our own mental contents. In addition, we mean to demonstrate the existence of certain tensions in Bilgrami’s view of externalism.Keywords Conceptual atributions, psychological content, internalism, externalism. (shrink)

Akeel Bilgrami’s paper considers the populist surges of our times in three countries: Trump’s America, Brexit Britain, and Modi’s India, distinguishing the special features of each, and philosophically and politically analyzing the relations that populism bears to both liberalism and the capitalist political economies of liberal-democratic societies.