At least since the late Early Modern period, the Holy Grail of ethics, for many philosophers, has been to say how ethical values could have a kind of protagorean objectivity: values are to be both fully objective as values and yet depend on us by their very nature. More than any other contemporary foundational approach it is “constructivist” theories, such as those due to Rawls, Scanlon, and Korsgaard, which have consciously sought to explain how protagorean objectivity is a real possibility. (...) Yet there remains considerable uncertainty about what the various versions of constructivism have in common, what, if anything, “constructivism” as a general approach is supposed to accomplish, and whether, if it is a general approach, it amounts to a distinctive foundational view. (shrink)

Can we regard ourselves as having free will? What is the place of values in a world of facts? What grounds the authority of moral injunctions, and why should we care about them? Unless we provide satisfactory answers to these questions, ethics has no credible status and is likely to be subsumed by psychology, history, or rational decision theory. According to Ermanno Bencivenga, this outcome is both common and regrettable. Bencivenga points to Immanuel Kant for the solution. Kant's (...) philosophy is a sustained, bold, and successful effort aiming at offering us the answers we need. Ethics Vindicated is a clear and thorough account of this effort that builds on Bencivenga's previous interpretation of transcendental philosophy (as articulated in his Kant's Copernican Revolution) and draws on the entire Kantian corpus. (shrink)

THIS ARTICLE PRESENTS A THEORY OF REFERENCE AS AN INTENTIONAL ACT, INDEPENDENT OF THE METAPHYSICAL ASSUMPTION OF THE EXISTENCE OF A REAL (AND COMMON) WORLD. ACCORDING TO THE THEORY, SPEAKERS REFER TO ENTITIES IN THEIR COGNITIVE SPACES. DIFFERENT SPEAKERS HAVE DIFFERENT SPACES, WHICH AT ANY GIVEN TIME MIRROR THEIR BELIEF-SYSTEMS AT THAT TIME. OBJECTS IN COGNITIVE SPACES ARE DISTINGUISHED FROM IDEAS, "SINNE", AND MEINONGIAN NON-EXISTENTS, AND SEVERAL DIFFICULTIES OF THE THEORY ARE DISCUSSED: AMONG THEM, HOW TO HANDLE COMMUNICATION AND TRUTH.

This clear, accessible account of Hegelian logic makes a case for its enormous seductiveness, its surprising presence in the collective consciousness, and the dangers associated therewith. Offering comprehensive coverage of Hegel's important works, Bencivenga avoids getting bogged down in short-lived scholarly debates to provide a work of permanent significance and usefulness.

Ever since Clifford Geertz urged the “blurring of genres” in the social sciences, many scholars have considered the crossing of disciplinary boundaries a healthy alternative to rigidly maintaining them. But what precisely does the metaphor of “blurring” imply? By unpacking the varieties of visual experiences that are normally grouped under this rubric, this essay seeks to provide some precision to our understanding of the implications of fuzziness. It extrapolates from the blurring caused by differential focal distances, velocities of objects in (...) the visual field, and competing perspectival vantage points to comparable effects in the intersection of different scholarly disciplines. Arguing against the holistic implications of Geertz's metaphor, as well as the even more totalizing concept of “consilience” introduced by E. O. Wilson, it suggests that blurring implies new types of complexity between or among those disciplines. (shrink)

Logic is often seen as the bedrock of intellectual life. It aims to be straight-forward, true, clear. But in this provocative book of postmodern philosophy, Ermanno Bencivenga presents an extended reflection on the subversive nature of logic--logic that is not stable and certain, but deceptive and tortuous. The author uses Anselm, the Archbishop of Canterbury at the end of the eleventh century, as his case study to show how human reason can be devious. In Anselm's famous texts, his beliefs (...) are not at stake, he is sure of them--he only seeks to under-stand his faith, not to prove it. But by looking at Anselm's writings as a whole, Bencivenga argues that they undermine Anselm's own interpretation. Not only can reason be more effective than force in fighting the unorthodox, but it can also be a subtle way of undermining orthodoxy. Bencivenga demonstrates how reason plays different roles at the different levels of Anselm's project. For its authoritarian subject, reason imposes a limit on its rebellious character. For its subversive subject, reason opens up an infinite arena for experimentation whose end will never be reached. Ultimately, Logic and Other Nonsense asks hard questions about the nature of philosophy in Anselm's world, as well as our own. (shrink)

Tolstoy’s War and Peace is a magnificent work; as any such work, it can be read in a variety of ways and be found to teach us important lessons at a number of independent levels. Here I want to look at it as an extended meditation on historical causality---and, by implication, on causality, period. So I will not be taking it for granted that it is a novel; I will be treating it as if it were an outcome of the (...) conceptual reflection philosophers engage in---though, when all is said and done, I will be able to shed light on some of its structural features as a novel. (shrink)

A classic experiment by Henri Tajfel provides evidence for the conclusion that the division of a group into subgroups is enough to trigger discriminatory behavior, even if there is no reason for such behavior in terms of the individual’s own interest. I don’t challenge that conclusion; but I question an implicit assumption which is suggested by the experimental setup and by the language used by Tajfel in describing the experiment. The assumption is that an initially coherent group will typically experience (...) division as a result of outside influence. A totally different picture of the situation and totally different social policy recommendations will follow if we believe instead that groups are evolving structures, and specifically structures that constantly and autonomously come into conflict with themselves. (shrink)

The correspondence theory of truth provides standard semantics with a simple scheme for evaluating sentences. This scheme however depends on the existence of basic correspondences between singular terms and objects, And thus breaks down in the case of non-Denoting singular terms. An alternative to the correspondence theory is thus called for in dealing with such terms. The author criticizes various positions discussed in the literature in this regard, And then presents a solution of his own.

This is a highly original, wide-ranging, and unorthodox discourse on the idea of philosophy contained in Kant's major work, the Critique of Pure Reason. Bencivenga proposes a novel explanation of the Critique's celebrated "obscurity." This great obstacle to reading Kant, Bencivenga argues, has nothing to do with Kant's being a bad writer or with his having anything very complicated to say; rather, it is the natural result of the kind of operation Kant was performing: a universal conceptual revolution. (...) Bencivenga contends that in rejecting the traditional way of doing philosophy, Kant was proposing a paradigm shift comparable in magnitude to Copernicus's overthrow of the Ptolemaic view of the cosmos. Kant, however, was not successful in establishing his idea of philosophy as the new paradigm, and the old view persists in many contemporary versions. Bencivenga argues in favor of Kant's position, which he sees as entailing the view that the role of philosophy is to offer a plausible story about how objectivity might be grounded in certain principles of coherence of our mental states. This book is the story of Kant's revolutionary turnabout, what motivated it, and where it took him; it reveals Kant not only as a figure of historical importance, but as a source of ideas of great contemporary interest. (shrink)

A logic is a doctrine of the logos, that is, of meaningful discourse; hence the first thing we expect from it is an account of what makes the logos meaningful — of what a meaning is. There is no single such doctrine or account: it is part of the immense richness of meaningful discourse that we can shift back and forth between several logics — several organized ways of reasoning, of providing reasons or grounds for our claims. Building on previous (...) work on Hegel's dialectical logic, the author here identifies three distinct logics simultaneously in play in our conversations. Analytic logic structures its organization of discourse around negation, contraries, and hence arguments forcing a conclusion to follow (under threat of inconsistency) from some premises. Dialectical logic's main tool is the construction of narratives, hence the attempted incorporation of interlocutors within one's own story. The third option, here labeled gradual logic, sees sorites (which are recalcitrant anomalies for the analytic approach) as ideal cases, since the bleeding of a predicate into an alleged contrary points the way to reaching an agreement among initially conflicting parties: to them eventually coming to regard themselves as stressing different aspects of one and the same thing. (shrink)

The famous passage from Descartes' Sixth Meditation (54), proving that I am distinct from my body, is analysed in a way that it presupposes the following argument: (1) God can make X and Y distinct. (2) I f God can make X and Y distinct, then X and Y are distinct. (3) Therefore, X and Y are distinct. (2) is shown up as the crucial premise, several objections to it and possible ways out are discussed with the result that Descartes (...) needs to avoid references to God within the argument for the real distinctness of mind and body. (shrink)

In her book "descartes", Margaret wilson proposes a new interpretation of the dreaming argument. According to this interpretation, Descartes does not reach his conclusion via a subconclusion that I cannot be certain that I am not dreaming (as was claimed by more traditional authors such as moore, Malcolm, Frankfurt, And walsh), But rather directly, By pointing out that I cannot be certain that waking experience is veridical. The present article examines the arguments supporting wilson's interpretation, And finds them to be (...) faulty. Thus the article's conclusions clearly favor the traditional interpretations mentioned above. (shrink)

Since Descartes, mathematics has been dominated by a reductionist tendency, whose success would seem to promise greater certainty: the fewer basic objects mathematics can be understood as dealing with, and the fewer principles one is forced to assume about these objects, the easier it will be to establish a secure foundation for it. But this tendency has had the effect of sharply limiting the expressive power of mathematics, in a way that is made especially apparent by its disappointing applications to (...) the social sciences. We should move in the opposite direction: toward a mathematics that deals in general with constructed objects, and whose scope includes fictional, poetic characters as much as numbers and sets. (shrink)

Urban gaming simulation appeared in American universities in the early 1960s, following the successful applications of gaming simulations in military and financial fields, when urban structures were in crisis. This guest column, by a philosopher who has speculated about philosophy and other cultural endeavors as forms of play, points out conceptual traps that specialists in UGS should avoid and decisions they ought to consider making. In particular, the author warns against making too much of the distinction between “games” and “play” (...) and advises UGS practitioners to conceive of their own activity as playful and exploratory. He argues that practitioners should approach clients not as “professionals” but rather as people with experience acquired from much play, on many different terrains. The essay concludes by suggesting that professionals in all fields—scientific and otherwise—ought to see themselves in much the same way. (shrink)

A narrative element is essential to philosophy, because nothing gets going in it without some vision, some story about what the world, or the subject, is like. The argumentative element can only structure the story from the inside; it can never prove it true. And, whatever clarification arguments provide for the story, the latter remains in all its ambiguous glory, ready to originate new arguments and to spawn new visions.