The 'Discussion' section of this issue contains the following responses to Wilfred Beckerman's article 'Sustainable Development: Is it a Useful Concept?' Environmental Values 3,3 (1994): 191-209. Herman Daly, 'On Wilfred Beckerman's Critique of Sustainable Development'; Michael Jacobs, 'Sustainable Development, Capital Substitution and Humility: A Response to Beckerman'; and Henryk Skolimowski, 'In Defence of Sustainable Development'. These criticisms are answered by Beckerman in Environmental Values 4,2.

The 'Discussion' section of this issue contains the following responses to Wilfred Beckerman's article 'Sustainable Development: Is it a Useful Concept?' Environmental Values 3,3 (1994): 191-209. Herman Daly, 'On Wilfred Beckerman's Critique of Sustainable Development'; Michael Jacobs, 'Sustainable Development, Capital Substitution and Humility: A Response to Beckerman'; and Henryk Skolimowski, 'In Defence of Sustainable Development'. These criticisms are answered by Beckerman in Environmental Values 4,2.

This volume unites various contributions reflecting the intellectual interests exhibited by Professor Herman Parret (Institute of Philosophy, Leuven), who has continued to observe, and often critically assess, ongoing developments in pragmatics throughout his career. In fact, Parret's contributions to philosophical and empirical/linguistic pragmatics present substantive proposals in the epistemics of communication, while simultaneously offering meta-comments on the ideological premises of extant pragmatic analyses. In a lengthy introduction, an overview is provided of his achievements in promoting an integrated, "maximalist" pragmatics, (...) as well as of the links between his own work in philosophy of language and in semiotics and aesthetics. The remaining 12 essays address relevant pragmatic themes or look into the relation between pragmatics and neighboring disciplines. They deal with grammatical deixis (Brisard, Ikegami) and mood (van der Auwera & Schalley), performativity (Harnish, Holdcroft), speech-act types and their praxeological dimensions (Roulet, Van Overbeke), Wittgensteinian language games (Marques, Parisi), cultural and intercultural identities (Vandenabeele, Verschueren), and the visual arts (Wildgen). (shrink)

Nietzsche says "good Europeans" must not only cultivate a "supra-national" view, but also "supra-European" perspective to transcend their European biases and see beyond the horizon of Western culture. The volume takes up such conceptual frontier crossings and syntheses. Emphasizing Nietzsche's genealogy of European culture and his reflections upon the constitution of Europe in the broadest sense, its essays examine peoples and nations, values and arts, knowledge and religion. Nietzsche's apprehensions about the crises of nihilism and decadence and their implications for (...) Europe's future are investigated in this context. Concerning the crossing of notional frontiers, contributors examine Nietzsche's hoped-for dismantling of Europe's state borders, the overcoming of national prejudices and rivalries, and the propagation of a revitalizing "supra-European" perspective on the continent, its culture and future. They also illuminate lines of syntheses, notably the syncretism of the ancient Greeks and its possible example for the European culture to-be. Finally certain of Europe's current problems are considered via the critical apparatus furnished by Nietzsche's philosophy and the diagnostic tools it provides. (shrink)

In this comprehensive collection of essays, most of which appear for the first time, eminent scholars from many disciplines—philosophy, economics, sociology, political science, demography, theology, history, and social psychology—examine the causes, nature, and consequences of present-day consumption patterns in the United States and throughout the world.

At the forefront of international concerns about global legislation and regulation, a host of noted environmentalists and business ethicists examine ethical issues in consumption from the points of view of environmental sustainability, economic development, and free enterprise.

In Philosophy without Intuitions, Herman Cappelen challenges the ‘almost universally accepted’ thesis of ‘Centrality’: ‘philosophers rely on intuitions as evidence for philosophical theories’. Cappelen takes there to be two arguments for Centrality and rejects both. According to the first, Centrality is supported by the way philosophers characterize key premises in their arguments as ‘intuitive’. Central to Cappelen’s rejection of this is his lengthy argument that philosophers’ ‘intuition’-talk is very hard to interpret, indeed often ‘meaningless’. I argue, in contrast, that (...) this talk is easy to interpret. The great mass of philosophers who would endorse Centrality mean by ‘intuition’ just what it ordinarily means: ‘immediate judgment, without reasoning or inference’. Cappelen claims further that philosophers’ ‘intuition’-talk, however it is interpreted, does not support Centrality. I argue that this talk, interpreted in the ordi.. (shrink)

This paper offers a characterization and critique of the idea of bounded rationality and its consequences for public policy. It offers an alternative way of accounting for the crucial features of human rationality that bounded rationality sees, using categories inspired by the Reformational philosophy of Herman Dooyeweerd and others, and then shows how this alternative account of the “bounds” of human rationality points toward an alternative orientation toward public policy-making.

This paper develops an interpretation of the relationship between Kant's various formulations of the categorical imperative in the Groundwork that steers a middle course between the formal and substantive poles of the interpretive spectrum, represented by John Rawls and Barbara Herman, respectively. Accepting and rejecting key aspects of both Rawls's and Herman's interpretations, I argue that the first formulation, understood correctly, does suffice to determine all Kantian moral duties, but only if duties are regarded as situation-specific rather than (...) standing obligations. I also argue, however, that the second and third formulations provide information that is necessary for understanding and applying the first formulation to determine one's duty correctly, and that the formulations are in a sense equivalent even though each plays a distinctive and important role. (shrink)

The worst of all possible worlds: Arthur Schopenhauer -- The despair of not being oneself: Soren Kierkegaard -- The interlinked terrors and wonders of God: Herman Melville -- The hell of no longer being able to love: Fyodor Dostoyevsky -- The inevitable end of everything: Leo Tolstoy -- The joy of living dangerously: Friedrich Nietzsche -- The dramatic richness of the concrete world: William James -- The only life that is really lived: Marcel Proust -- Our hopeless battle against (...) the boundaries of language: Ludwig Wittgenstein -- The benign indifference of the world: Albert Camus. (shrink)

Kant’s moral philosophy usually considers two types of duties: negative duties that prohibit certain actions and positive duties commanding action. With that, Kant insists on deriving all morality from reason alone. Such is the Categorical Imperative that Kant lays at the basis of ethics. Yet while negative duties can be derived from the Categorical Imperative and thus from reason, the paper argues that this is not the case with positive duties. After answering a number of attempts to derive positive duties (...) from the Categorical Imperative, most notably those of Barbara Herman, it sketches an alternative approach to understanding the relationship between the universal moral law and specific moral contents. (shrink)

An evening seminar was held in connection with the Multatuli lecture in Leuven. During that seminar, Michael Sandel was invited to respond to a few questions springing from his lecture and from his book Democracy’s Discontent. What follows is the transcript of that discussion in which questions were formulated by Antoon Vandevelde , Koen Raes , Amaryllis Verhoeven , Ab Bijma , Bart Pattyn , Joseph Selling and Herman De Dijn.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Lao-tzu and the Tao-te-chingJonathan R. HermanLao-tzu and the Tao-te-ching. Edited by Livia Kohn and Michael LaFargue. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. Pp. xii + 330.Modern scholarship on the Tao Te Ching has tended to focus on questions of authorship and the intended meaning of the text, often working from both the unquestioned assumption that matters of origination are of primary historical importance and the (...) quasi-theological bias that the original textual meaning is somehow the "right" or authoritative one. But the role of the Tao Te Ching in Chinese history and culture, as well as that of its purported author, is a much more complex affair. The text has been the subject of more than seven hundred commentaries and has been appropriated by vast networks of scholars, government officials, self-conscious religious communities, and laypeople, while Lao Tzu himself has undergone a fascinating history of deification and aesthetic representation. With Lao-tzu and the Tao-te-ching, editors Livia Kohn and Michael LaFargue take steps toward filling in some of the complicated (and much overlooked) post-canonical history by assembling essays on subjects ranging from the ritual uses of the text to modern hermeneutic experiments. The volume includes nine new essays, as well as three older ones reprinted or translated from earlier sources.The book is organized in four sections—"Ancient Myths," "Chinese Interpretations," "Modern Readings," and "Critical Methods"—although there is noticeable [End Page 625] overlap among the parts. The twelve essays are of varying quality and of varying use for different readers. Some of the material is highly technical and presupposes a sinological audience, while other material rehearses data that should already be familiar to scholars of ancient Chinese philosophy but may be tremendously useful to those who are interested in the text but lacking the scholarly background. One case of the latter is Julia Hardy's "Influential Western Interpretations of the Tao-te-ching," which does not especially break new ground but is a wonderful historical synopsis of Western scholarship on the text, as it meticulously identifies the key interpretive voices and sorts out their positions. Hardy gives only brief attention to the earliest eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholarship—omitting, for example, any mention of Victor von Strauss' 1870 German rendition—which might actually have been most edifying for specialists. LaFargue and Julian Pas' "On Translating the Tao-te-ching" is essentially a primer on hermeneutic problems relevant to the text that serves as an intelligent corrective to the uncoordinated body of Taoist materials available to novice readers.What may be most clear from several of the essays taken in tandem is that the popular Western "mystical" reading of the text not only is one of many historical interpretations but is also very much heir to Wang Pi's intellectual lineage. In "A Tale of Two Commentaries: Ho-shang-kung and Wang Pi on the Lao-tzu," Alan K. L. Chan notes how such standard tenets as the spiritualized metaphysical understanding of Tao, the relationship between nonbeing and creativity, and the identification of naturalness and nonaction with spontaneity originate with Wang Pi but are nowhere to be found in the earlier Ho-shang-kung reading. The latter employs typical Han dynasty correlative cosmological interpretive methods, referring to naturalness as the preservation of energies in the physical body and to "the One" not as an abstract metaphysical oneness but as "the original substance of life itself, energy in its most pure and potent form" (p. 93). According to Isabel Robinet's "Later Commen-taries: Textual Polysemy and Syncretistic Interpretations," the panoply of text interpretations falls into roughly three categories—"technical or specialist readings," "philosophical exegeses," and "inner alchemy interpretations," which she then proceeds to divide further into "philological" and "ideological" readings. This is all further complicated when one considers the Tao Te Ching not as a strictly philosophical text but as a collection of polemical aphorisms, as LaFargue does in "Recovering the Tao-te-ching's Original Meaning: Some Remarks on Historical Hermeneutics," or as a ritual, liturgical or meditative aid, as Kohn does in "The Tao-te-ching in Ritual."Lao-tzu and the... (shrink)

Birth and The Jazz Singer ostensibly exploit blacks in opposite ways. Birth makes war on blacks in the name of the fathers; The Jazz Singer’s protagonist adopts a black mask and kills his father. The Birth of a Nation, climaxing the worst period of violence against blacks in southern history, lynches the black; the jazz singer, ventriloquizing the black, sings through his mouth. Birth, a product of the progressive movement, has national political purpose. The Jazz Singer, marking the retreat from (...) public to private life in the jazz age, and the perceived pacification of the fantasized southern black threat, celebrates not political regeneration but urban entertainment.[ … ]Celebrating the blackface identification that Birth of a Nation denies, The Jazz Singer does no favor to blacks. The blackface jazz singer is neither a jazz singer nor black. Blackface marries ancient rivals in both movies; black and white marry in neither. Just as Birth offers a regeneration through violence, so the grinning, Jazz Singer, minstrelsy mask kills blacks with kindness. Michael Rogin teaches political science at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian , Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville , “Ronald Reagan,” the Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology. (shrink)

A number of neo-Kantians have suggested that an act may be morally worthy even if sympathy and similar emotions are present, so long as they are not what in fact motivates right action–so long as duty, and duty alone, in fact motivates. Thus, the ideal Kantian moral agent need not be a cold and unfeeling person, as some critics have suggested. Two objections to this view need to be answered. First, some maintain that motives cannot be present without in fact (...) motivating. Such non-motivating reasons, it is claimed, are incoherent. Second, if such motives are not in fact motivating, then nonetheless the moral agent's performance of right action will be objectionably cold and unfeeling. While the first objection is not compelling, since the alternative according to which all motives in fact motivate but differ in strength suffers from the very same problems attributed to the neo-Kantian view, the second has force, and any account of moral worth must make room for motives such as sympathy actually motivating right action. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Thinking with Heidegger:Rethinking Environmental Theory and PracticeKevin Michael DeLuca (bio)Environmentalism is tired. It is a movement both institutionalized and insipid. The vast majority of Americans claim to be environmentalists while buying ever more SUVs, leaf-blowers, and uncountable plastic consumer goods. Indeed, environmentalism itself has become just another practice of consumerism, a matter of buying Audubon memberships, Ansel Adams calendars, and 'biodegradable' plastic bags with one's Sierra Club credit (...) card. As a practice of everyday life, environmentalism has devolved into another lifestyle choice.On the political front, carbon-copy blow-dried presidential candidates proclaim their allegiance to the environment, an allegiance that is more a sign of fealty to opinion polls than a concern with environmental issues. In the world of real-politic, environmental regulations are gutted as corporations write legislation for the politicians they have bought. Outspent and outmaneuvered, mainstream environmental groups preach at the altar of broken promises about the potential of lobbying and insider access while awaiting the blandishments of the next candidate. As [End Page 67] a political practice, mainstream environmentalism has degenerated into a marginal special-interest group.On the intellectual front, a confusing array of reform environmentalists, deep ecologists, social ecologists, ecofeminists, wilderness advocates, social justice activists, social constructionists, and Christian ecologists offer a cacophony of competing paradigms and programs while exchanging charges and countercharges of wrong-headedness and infidelity. If on the level of practice an exhausted environmentalism has achieved both institutionalism and irrelevance, intellectually environmentalism has reached several stasis points. This is crucial, for at a level that is unusual for social movements, environmentalism has always highlighted the importance of how we think about the environment, that ideas of nature are powerful because practices follow from ideas. In other words, how we think about nature guides how we act toward nature. In the midst of this melee I want to suggest we reconsider the work of Martin Heidegger.I want to think Heidegger in distress: in the distress of machination; in the distress of the technological enframing of the earth; in the distress of the environmental crisis. In rejecting a Heideggerian hermeneutics, a piety to textual exegesis, I hope to stress Heidegger in order to stress environmental theory. With few exceptions,1 two insufficient responses typify the reception of Heidegger in environmental thinking. One is to champion Heidegger as some proto-environmentalist. Certainly, quotes from such works as Being and Time, Contributions to Philosophy: From Enowning, "The Question Concerning Technology," "Building Dwelling Thinking," and "The Age of the World Picture" inspire such a reading. Such readings, however, present a simplified Heidegger. For example, a poor reading of an essay such as "The Question Concerning Technology" produces the conclusion that Heidegger was anti-technology.2 These misreadings are not merely accidental but a result of the goal of the citation. The challenge of Heidegger is not engaged to develop environmental theory; rather, Heidegger is cited to lend some borrowed legitimacy to the fledgling enterprise. The most prominent example of this move occurs in Devall and Sessions' Deep Ecology, wherein Heidegger joins a potpourri of thinkers, including Dogen, Job, St. Francis of Assisi, Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, Thoreau, Chief Seattle, Herman Melville, John Muir, Aldous Huxley, Gandhi, Rainer Maria Rilke, Aldo Leopold, Robinson Jeffers, Mary Austin, Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner, Stanley Diamond, and [End Page 68] David Brower from a host of traditions, including Taoism, Hinduism, Zen Buddhism, Christianity, Native American thought, Romanticism, and ecological science (1985, 79–108). The result is confusion, at best.On the other hand, in a second response Heidegger serves as a kind of bogeyman, a Nazi used to tar the more radical environmental groups. The syllogism is simple and simplistic: Deep Ecologists are bio/ecocentric; Deep Ecologists quote Heidegger; Heidegger was a Nazi; Therefore, Deep Ecologists are Nazis/fascists. (To push this thinking to its logical extreme, then, all nonanthropocentric thinking is fascist.) Both responses may be useful for polemics but serve to prevent a possibly productive exploration of Heidegger for the engagement of the difficult problems that have stumped environmentalism on multiple levels.Violating HeideggerAs a prefatory word, even a cursory glance at Heidegger's work reveals him to be a thinker who... (shrink)

A giant statue of the mother goddess, Ishtar, presides over Intolerance , the movie D. W. Griffith made after his triumph with The Birth of a Nation . Ishtar sits above Babylon’s royal, interior court, but the court itself is constructed on so gigantic a scale that is diminishes the size of the goddess. Perhaps to establish Ishtar’s larger-than-life proportions, Griffith posed himself alongside her in a production still from the movie . The director is the same size as the (...) sculptured grown man who sucks at Ishtar’s breast; both males are dwarfed by the goddess’ dimensions.Ishtar connects Griffith to the concern with originary female power current at the turn of the twentieth century. The appearance of the New Woman and the attention to the matriarchal origins of culture were signs of a crisis in patriarchy. But the great mother could support masculine reassertion as well as female power. Ishtar will show us how. Michael Rogin is professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent books are Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville , and “Ronald Reagan,” the Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology. (shrink)

Er was een niet te overbruggen kloof tussen de officiële barok-cultuur van het Habsburgse keizerrijk en het kritisch modernisme van de late negentiende eeuw. Herman Broch was een van de moderne schrijvers, die het meest afwijzend tegenover de officiële esthetische normen stond. Ook als politieke balling in de Verenigde Staten bleef hij een gelouterd verlichtingsidee aanhangen, dat hem met de na-oorlogse sociale filosoof Habermas verbindt.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Thinking with Heidegger:Rethinking Environmental Theory and PracticeKevin Michael DeLuca (bio)Environmentalism is tired. It is a movement both institutionalized and insipid. The vast majority of Americans claim to be environmentalists while buying ever more SUVs, leaf-blowers, and uncountable plastic consumer goods. Indeed, environmentalism itself has become just another practice of consumerism, a matter of buying Audubon memberships, Ansel Adams calendars, and 'biodegradable' plastic bags with one's Sierra Club credit (...) card. As a practice of everyday life, environmentalism has devolved into another lifestyle choice.On the political front, carbon-copy blow-dried presidential candidates proclaim their allegiance to the environment, an allegiance that is more a sign of fealty to opinion polls than a concern with environmental issues. In the world of real-politic, environmental regulations are gutted as corporations write legislation for the politicians they have bought. Outspent and outmaneuvered, mainstream environmental groups preach at the altar of broken promises about the potential of lobbying and insider access while awaiting the blandishments of the next candidate. As [End Page 67] a political practice, mainstream environmentalism has degenerated into a marginal special-interest group.On the intellectual front, a confusing array of reform environmentalists, deep ecologists, social ecologists, ecofeminists, wilderness advocates, social justice activists, social constructionists, and Christian ecologists offer a cacophony of competing paradigms and programs while exchanging charges and countercharges of wrong-headedness and infidelity. If on the level of practice an exhausted environmentalism has achieved both institutionalism and irrelevance, intellectually environmentalism has reached several stasis points. This is crucial, for at a level that is unusual for social movements, environmentalism has always highlighted the importance of how we think about the environment, that ideas of nature are powerful because practices follow from ideas. In other words, how we think about nature guides how we act toward nature. In the midst of this melee I want to suggest we reconsider the work of Martin Heidegger.I want to think Heidegger in distress: in the distress of machination; in the distress of the technological enframing of the earth; in the distress of the environmental crisis. In rejecting a Heideggerian hermeneutics, a piety to textual exegesis, I hope to stress Heidegger in order to stress environmental theory. With few exceptions,1 two insufficient responses typify the reception of Heidegger in environmental thinking. One is to champion Heidegger as some proto-environmentalist. Certainly, quotes from such works as Being and Time, Contributions to Philosophy: From Enowning, "The Question Concerning Technology," "Building Dwelling Thinking," and "The Age of the World Picture" inspire such a reading. Such readings, however, present a simplified Heidegger. For example, a poor reading of an essay such as "The Question Concerning Technology" produces the conclusion that Heidegger was anti-technology.2 These misreadings are not merely accidental but a result of the goal of the citation. The challenge of Heidegger is not engaged to develop environmental theory; rather, Heidegger is cited to lend some borrowed legitimacy to the fledgling enterprise. The most prominent example of this move occurs in Devall and Sessions' Deep Ecology, wherein Heidegger joins a potpourri of thinkers, including Dogen, Job, St. Francis of Assisi, Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, Thoreau, Chief Seattle, Herman Melville, John Muir, Aldous Huxley, Gandhi, Rainer Maria Rilke, Aldo Leopold, Robinson Jeffers, Mary Austin, Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner, Stanley Diamond, and [End Page 68] David Brower from a host of traditions, including Taoism, Hinduism, Zen Buddhism, Christianity, Native American thought, Romanticism, and ecological science (1985, 79–108). The result is confusion, at best.On the other hand, in a second response Heidegger serves as a kind of bogeyman, a Nazi used to tar the more radical environmental groups. The syllogism is simple and simplistic: Deep Ecologists are bio/ecocentric; Deep Ecologists quote Heidegger; Heidegger was a Nazi; Therefore, Deep Ecologists are Nazis/fascists. (To push this thinking to its logical extreme, then, all nonanthropocentric thinking is fascist.) Both responses may be useful for polemics but serve to prevent a possibly productive exploration of Heidegger for the engagement of the difficult problems that have stumped environmentalism on multiple levels.Violating HeideggerAs a prefatory word, even a cursory glance at Heidegger's work reveals him to be a thinker who... (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)

This paper traces the origins of Eugene Wigner's pioneering application of group theory to quantum physics to his early work in chemistry and crystallography. In the early 1920s, crystallography was the only discipline in which symmetry groups were routinely used. Wigner's early training in chemistry, and his work in crystallography with Herman Mark and Karl Weissenberg at the Kaiser Wilhelm institute for fiber research in Berlin exposed him to conceptual tools which were absent from the pedagogy available to physicists (...) for many years to come. This both enabled and pushed him to apply the group theoretic approach to quantum physics. It took many years for the approach first introduced by Wigner in the 1920s – and whose reception by the physicists was initially problematical – to assume the pivotal place it now holds in physical theory and education. This is but one example that attests to the historic contribution made by the periphery in initiating new types of thought-perspectives and scientific careers. (shrink)

Vor dem Hintergrund fanatischer religiöser Konflikte und in Kenntnis der im 17. Jahrhundert aufblühenden exakten Wissenschaften entwickelte Spinoza einen der anspruchsvollsten Entwürfe der Philosophiegeschichte: seine in geometrischer Ordnung dargestellte Ethik. Sie handelt von der Ontologie, Erkenntnislehre, den menschlichen Gefühlen und der Freiheit und Unfreiheit Einzelner wie auch der sozialer Gemeinschaften in einem einzigen durchgehenden Argumentationsgang. Das Werk verbindet auf diese Weise die höchsten Ansprüche begrifflicher und begründender Durchsichtigkeit mit von Lebenserfahrung gesättigter Weisheit. Es versteht sich selbst als eine Anleitung zum (...) Glück für die, die bereit sind, sich nur auf ihre Vernunft und nicht auf Autoritäten zu verlassen. Bis heute ist das Buch Maßstab aufgeklärter theoretischer und praktischer Vernunft geblieben. Seine fünf Teile werden in diesem kollektiven Kommentar durch jeweils drei Aufsätze erläutert. Eine Einleitung schildert die Ambitionen und historischen Folgen der "Ethik". Mit Beiträgen von: Francis Aman, Wolfgang Bartuschat, Thomas Cook, Herman De Djin, Christof Ellsiepen, Stephen Gaukroger, Michael Hampe, Thomas Kisser, Alexandre Matheron, Pierre-François Moreau, Michael Pauen, Dominik Perler, Ursula Renz, Michael Della Rocca, Robert Schnepf, Manfred Walther und Jean-Claude Wolf. (shrink)

Abstract:A brief response to papers presented by Herman Saatkamp, Krzysztof Skowroński, Eric Weber, and John Stuhr on the occasion of John Lachs' retirement from Vanderbilt University.

Tally reviews Loren Goldner's Herman Melville: Between Charlemagne and the Antemosaic Cosmic King, which posits that Melville was the American Marx, exposing the crisis of bourgeois ideology in the revolutionary period around 1848. In this, Goldner follows a tradition of Marxian scholarship of Melville, notably including C.L.R. James, Michael Paul Rogin, and Cesare Casarino. Tally concludes that Goldner's argument, while interesting, is limited by its focus on American exceptionalism and by ignoring the postnational force of Melville's novels.

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.

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?

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.

One central purpose of Experimental Philosophy (hereafter, x-phi) is to criticize the alleged reliance on intuitions in contemporary philosophy. In my book Philosophy without Intuitions (hereafter, PWI), I argue that philosophers don’t rely on intuitions. If those arguments are good, experimental philosophy has been engaged in an attack on a strawman. The goal of this paper is to bolster the criticism of x-phi in the light of responses.

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.