Online research in philosophy

Peter Winch, in his political philosophy, wanted to rethink the concepts of political authority, legitimacy and political culture, with a starting point in Wittgensteinian ideas. This essay brings together Winch's thoughts on political authority. Developing insights from Wittgenstein's work on certainty, Winch emphasised the unstated background behind any normative stand concerning authority. Ideas of legitimacy and civil society are formed within historically specific political cultures. In the 1990s, Winch was increasingly inclined to emphasise disagreement, which was related to his developing (...) views on understanding, logic and reasoning. This development is traced, in part, on the basis of unpublished lecture notes. (shrink)

Philosophers of mind often assume that methodological solipsism, as outlined in the Second Meditation, is Descartes' last bid on the nature of mental life. This paper argues, instead, that it is a transitional position he overcomes in the dynamic progression of his philosophical therapy. The Third Meditation questions the methodological solipsism that in fact owes much to (received) Cartesian dualism for its dissemination. Descartes' treatment of error has important analogies with Wittgenstein's private language argument. As Lévinas emphasises in his dialogical (...) philosophy, Descartes' proof of God via the concept of error involves recognition of the irreducibility of the Other. (shrink)

A conscious being is characterized by its ability to cope with the environment--to perceive it, sometimes change it, and perhaps reflect on it. Surprisingly, most studies of the mind's place in nature show little interest in such interaction. It is often implicitly assumed that the main questions about consciousness just concern the status of various entities, levels, etc., within the individual. The intertwined notions of "(conscious) experience" and "(phenomenal) consciousness" are considered. The predominant use of these notions in cognitive science (...) can be traced back to Cartesianism. What is important is the survival of the central methodological commitments despite seemingly profound changes of metaphysical outlook. The author argues (1) that cognitive scientists typically assimilate perception to sensation, thereby ignoring ways in which descriptions of perception and descriptions of the environment are logically intertwined; (2) that this involves methodological solipsism and an unacknowledged sceptical position that was originally part of Descartes' Dream argument; and (3) that it is impossible to identify the object supposedly to be studied by a science of the phenomenal consciousness. A somewhat parallel argument is identified in Kant's critique of rationalist psychology. (shrink)