Outline: 1. Why Judgment? 2. Inverse Psychologism: General Issues 3. Inverse Psychologism in the Phenomeno-Logic of Judgment 4. Judgment and Language 5. [De-]stabilizing Kant’s Inverse Psychologism..
IN PLACE OF AN ABSTRACT: I here report on my work-in-progress addressing Rousseau’s naturalistic account of human agency. In the first half of these notes I attempt to throw light on the distinctive character of Rousseau’s philosophical naturalism. I compare Rousseau’s naturalism both to that of his own contemporaries and to some of our own (§1), but argue that Rousseauian naturalism is better understood as a development of ancient forms of ethical naturalism, particularly as mediated by Seneca (§2). I then (...) turn to consider how Rousseau’s distinctive naturalistic commitments shape his treatment of the problem of self-consciousness, in particular with regard to the self-consciousness involved in action. I argue that Rousseau identifies two fundamental structures of self-consciousness essential to beings with natures like ours. The first is Rousseauian conscience, understood following the Stoics as a form of natural selfsentiment (§3); the second is associated with the distinctively human task of confession, understood as a form of self-judgment (§4). (shrink)
The spectre of Descartes figured as a perpetual presence in much of twentieth century philosophy, but nearly always as an emblem for positions to be avoided. Cartesian foundationalism in epistemology, the ontological dualism of mind and body, the associated conception of the mind as a substance, and as a “thing that thinks” – all these have figured in recent philosophy as positions to be refuted or simply renounced, the absurda in one or another reductio argument. But for one prominent twentieth (...) century tradition the story is much more nuanced and complex. Twentieth century phenomenology, which began to stir as a well-defined movement in the last decade of the nineteenth century and has persisted in one form or another into the twenty-first, found in Descartes much more a causa belli than the usual bête noire. As a first approximation we can say that allegiance to Cartesianism divided the phenomenological tradition. Edmund Husserl, who along with Franz Brentano is usually acknowledged as the founder of the phenomenological movement, described Descartes as “the genuine patriarch of phenomenology”; he dubbed his own transcendental phenomenology as “a new, twentieth century Cartesianism”, and insisted that “the only fruitful renaissance is the one which reawakens [Descartes’] Meditations” (Husserl 1929/1964, 3, 5). But Husserl’s most important assistant, Martin Heidegger, rebelled against the Cartesian legacy in modern philosophy, which he saw as the central wrong-turn in modern thought, and as the chief obstacle to a faithful phenomenology and phenomenologically informed ontology. The cogito sum, Heidegger insisted, must be “phenomenologically destroyed” (Heidegger 1927/1962, 123). In Descartes himself Heidegger found “an extreme.. (shrink)
Few periods in the history of philosophy manifest the degree of dynamism and historical complexity that characterize early post-Kantian philosophy. The reasons for this special character of so-called “classical German philosophy” are no doubt themselves quite complex. Institutional and political circumstances certainly played an important role. The end of the eighteenth century marks a point at which philosophy was seen as being deeply implicated in the political developments of the day (in particular: the upheavals in France). What’s more, this intense (...) political context for philosophy coincided with the reemergence of “academic” philosophy: the first point in the modern period when the leading figures on the philosophical scene were members of a common (and flourishing) academic community.2 But more narrowly philosophical factors are also important. Kant’s philosophical accomplishment was widely seen as marking a watershed in philosophy’s development, but it was an accomplishment whose lessons and viability were highly.. (shrink)
It is not usual to think of Fichte as a logician, nor indeed to think of him as leaving a legacy that shaped the subsequent history of symbolic logic. But I argue here that there is such a legacy, and that Fichte formulated an agenda in formal logic that his students (and their students in turn) used to spark a logical revolution. That revolution arguably reached its culmination in the logical writings of Franz Brentano, better known as a founding figure (...) of the phenomenological movement. In logical writings that were published only posthumously, but that were fully elaborated in the decade prior to the publication of Frege’s Begriffschrift, Brentano (together with his collaborator Anton Marty) developed a radically innovative logical calculus that was explicitly designed to overthrow the orthodox logical analysis of judgment and inference. At the center of this revolution was the notion of thetic judgment [thetische Urteil], a form of judgment upon which Fichte had insisted in the first published version of the Wissenschaftslehre, and which his students subsequently set out to accommodate within the framework provided by Kant’s general logic. But thetic judgment proved resistant to such assimilation, and it was left to Brentano to use the analysis of thetic judgment in his attempt to topple a long-standing logical tradition. In what follows I reconstruct the main episodes in this century-long drama in the logical theory of judgment. My discussion is divided into four sections. I begin with a review of Fichte’s most explicit call for logical revolution, together with his introduction of the notion of thetic judgment, set against the backdrop of an anomaly. (shrink)
Fichte’s introduction to the Sittenlehre rather strikingly says nothing about Sitten or Sittlichkeit, nothing about Moral, virtually nothing about die Ethik. Aside from one very pregnant promissory note with no immediate bearing on ethical matters, it says nothing about the specific tasks and strategy of the book it introduces. What it provides instead is a concise statement of Fichte’s fundamental philosophical commitments and a powerful illustration of his distinctive combination of transcendental and phenomenological approaches in philosophy in general and to (...) the problems of action in particular. In approaching Fichte’s text we will do well to focus on three points: the systematic place of the text in Fichte’s corpus and in his system; Fichte’s sketch of the phenomenology and transcendental conditions of agency; and the problem of understanding the distinctive normativity of Fichte’s transcendental/phenomenological laws. (shrink)
Es fällt auf, daß in Fichtes Einleitung in die Sittenlehre von Sitten oder von Sittlichkeit ebensowenig die Rede ist wie von Moral; auch über Ethik wird so gut wie nichts gesagt. Abgesehen von einer vielversprechenden Ankündigung, die jedoch keinen unmittelbaren Bezug auf ethische Fragen hat, gibt sie keinerlei Auskunft über die spezifischen Aufgaben und die Argumentationsstrategie des Buches, dessen Einleitung sie ist. Was sie statt dessen bietet, ist eine konzise Darlegung der fundamentalen philosophischen Prämissen Fichtes und eine wirkungsvolle Illustration der (...) für Fichte typischen Kombination von transzendentalen und phänomenologischen Herangehensweisen an die Philosophie im allgemeinen und an die Probleme des Handelns im besonderen. Wenn wir uns Fichtes Text nähern, dann tun wir gut daran, uns auf drei Punkte zu konzentrieren: auf den systematischen Ort des Textes im Korpus seiner Schriften und in seinem System, auf Fichtes Skizze sowohl der Phänomenologie als auch der transzendentalen Bedingungen der Tätigkeit und schließlich auf das Problem, wie die spezifische Normativität von Fichtes transzendentalphänomenologischen Gesetzen zu verstehen ist. (shrink)
My aim in what follows is to contribute to recent discussions concerning the place of phenomenology within the tradition of transcendental philosophy. Very broadly, the issue here is whether phenomenology aspires to provide transcendental results, and if so, whether it can hope meet those aspirations. This is a large and many-faceted question; my aim here is to explore one rather narrow slice of it. I shall for the most part confine my attention to the version of the phenomenological enterprise found (...) in Division I of Being and Time. And I shall concern myself not with the full range of questions raised by the idea of a transcendental inquiry but rather myopically with a set of questions concerning the distinctive logical modality of purported transcendental results. This modality can be identified in various ways, but we can see it at work in the oft-repeated thought that transcendental philosophy aims to identify the conditions on the possibility of certain facts or features of our experience. (The archetype for this sort of claim is of course Kant’s thesis that the application of the categories is a condition on the possibility of self-conscious experience.) If A is a condition on the possibility of B, then it would seem that A must obtain, given the actuality of B. We might accordingly frame the issue as a question about the modality of necessity in the context of Heideggerian phenomenology. Even so narrowed, the issues here are still pretty large and thorny. I don’t pretend here to be able to resolve them; my hope is that I can at least sharpen the questions and perhaps thereby render them more tractable. In pursuing these issues I shall pay particular attention to a recent illuminating analysis proposed and elaborated by Taylor Carman. (shrink)
Hegel’s very first acknowledged publication was, among other things, an attack on Fichte.1 In 1801, Hegel was still laboring in almost complete obscurity, while Fichte was an international sensation, though already somewhat past the peak of his meteoric career. In the 1801 Differenzschrift, Hegel cut his teeth by criticizing Fichte’s already widely-criticized Wissenschaftslehre, and by demonstrating that Schelling’s philosophical system was not simply to be equated with it. Fichte himself never bothered to respond to Hegel’s criticisms; indeed he never publicly (...) acknowledged their existence. This was not because he was unconcerned with criticisms of his views; quite the contrary. But at the time he had bigger fish to fry. He responded to Jacobi’s criticisms, and to Schelling’s; he replied in great detail to critical questions raised by Reinhold, and with vituperative intensity to objections raised by skeptics and purportedly loyal Kantians. But Hegel’s Differenzschrift was left without a Fichtean rebuttal. This is a pity, both because of the missed opportunity to illuminate by controversy central issues at stake in the post-Kantian period, but also because it made it easier for Hegel simply to reiterate his youthful criticism as if it were the last word. And reiterate it he did: in one form or another Hegel’s early criticisms of Fichte reappear at every subsequent stage of his career: in the Phenomenology, in the Science of Logic, in the Encyclopaedia, as the final chapter in Hegel’s History of Philosophy, and in countless other minor works and documents from the Nachlass and correspondence. (shrink)
Acts of criticism characteristically display a negative and a positive dimension. I undertake a qualified defense of the thesis that both dimensions are essential, at least in the case of logical criticism – criticism that relies either implicitly or explicitly on the resources of logic. Such criticism presupposes at least a minimal grasp on what is involved in ‘getting it right’ in the domain that is subjected to critique. In making the case I distinguish between positive and negative logic. Traditional (...) logic is positive insofar as it takes as primitive a positive notion, typically truth. I consider to what extent logic might be reconstructed on an exclusively negative basis – as a tool for avoiding falsity and fallacy. Negative logic faces serious obstacles which suggest a prima facie case that logical criticism is essentially, not just accidentally, positive. (shrink)
I investigate Stoic accounts of the structure and function of self-consciousness, specifically in connection with the Stoic notion of Oikeiosis. After reviewing the tortured history of attempts to translate this ancient notion into modern terms, I set out to determine its content by identifying its inferential role in Stoic moral psychology. I then provide a reconstruction of the Stoic claim that Oikeiosis is or involves a form of self-consciousness (Chrysippus), self-sentiment (Seneca), or synæsthesia (Hierocles). I show how the Stoic conception (...) of self-consciousness differs fundamentally from modern accounts of selfconsciousness as a form of psychic self-presence or epistemic self-certainty, and I exhibit the limitations of Long’s treatment of Stoic self-consciousness as proprioception. Finally, I offer a reconstruction of the Stoic claim that self-consciousness figures as a condition on the possibility of perception and desire, providing a form of normative orientation essential for intentional determinacy. (shrink)
We undertake to bring a phenomenological perspective to bear on a challenge of contemporary law and clinical practice. In a wide variety of contexts, legal and medical professionals are called upon to assess the competence or capacity of an individual to exercise her own judgement in making a decision for herself. We focus on decisions regarding consent to or refusal of medical treatment and contrast a widely recognised clinical instrument, the MacCAT-T, with a more phenomenologically informed approach. While the MacCAT-T (...) focuses attention on individual cognitive performance criteria, an approach oriented by second-person phenomenology brings into view the complex role of time, others and identity in constituting the capacity for individual autonomous judgement. Our phenomenological analysis has consequences both for the practice of capacity assessments and for further research in this arena. Good practice in capacity assessment must attend to decision communities, distributed capacity, and temporal competence, while research on mental capacity will miss the phenomenon if it trains its focus ‘between the ears.’ We illustrate our approach by considering two recent cases of contested capacity: one involving cognitive disability in a dysfunctional decision community, the second presenting the possibility of competent decision-making under conditions of paranoid schizophrenia. (shrink)
In this review of Robert Pippin's recent book, elements of Hegel's Practical Philosophy are assessed both against opposed philosophical positions and by the guidance they offer in thinking through the practical matter of deciding what to eat.
I assess a series of arguments intended to show that 'ought' implies 'can'. Two are rooted in uses of 'ought' in contexts of deliberation and command. A third draws on the distinctive resources of deontic logic. I show that, in each case, the arguments leave scope for forms of infinite moral consciousness—forms of moral consciousness in which a moral obligation retains its authority even in the face of the conviction that the obligation is impossible to fulfil. In this respect the (...) paper sides with Martin Luther against Erasmus and Kant. (shrink)
I set out to trace the history of a distinctive conception of self-consciousness -- from its first formulation in the 3rd century BC, through its reception among Roman philosophers around the 1st century AD, and finally to its fate in Enlightenment thought of the 18th century. I use this history to clarify and defend an idea that figured centrally in the history of philosophy, but which has recently come under sustained attack: the idea that human beings are in some very (...) fundamental way self- conscious beings, and that our self-consciousness serves as a kind of foundation or transcendental condition for our other cognitive capacities. Obviously, given the scale of these ambitions, the presentation here should be considered at best a sketch. It is intended not to settle any matters, but at least to bring back into view a line of argument that has been covered over by more recent developments. (shrink)
Wayne Martin traces attempts to develop theories of judgment in British Empiricism, the logical tradition stemming from Kant, nineteenth-century psychologism, recent experimental neuropsychology, and the phenomenological tradition associated with Brentano, Husserl and Heidegger. His reconstruction of vibrant but largely forgotten nineteenth-century debates links Kantian approaches to judgment with twentieth-century phenomenological accounts. He also shows that the psychological, logical and phenomenological dimensions of judgment are not only equally important, but fundamentally interlinked.
In this paper I investigate the representation of self-consciousness in the still life tradition in the Netherlands around the time of Descartes’ residence there. I treat the paintings of this tradition as both a phenomenological resource and as a phenomenological undertaking in their own right. I begin with an introductory overview of the still life tradition, with particular attention to semiotic structures characteristic of the vanitas still life. I then focus my analysis on the representation of self-consciousness in this tradition, (...) identifying both a Cartesian mode of representation of self-consciousness but also a counter trend. (shrink)
In this paper I lay the foundations for an understanding of one of Fichte's most neglected and least understood texts: the late lecture course on Transcendental Logic. I situate this work in the context of Fichte's lifelong struggle with the problem of understanding the relation between logic and philosophy – a problem that I show to figure centrally both in Fichte's own revolutionary thinking and in his response to Kant's notorious denunciation of the Wissenschaftslehre. By attending to this context we (...) can understand Fichte's philosophical ambitions in the late lectures: a critique of particular doctrines of general logic; a critique of the conception of thought presupposed both by the traditional logic and by Kant himself; and a new conception of the relation between logic and the philosophical theory of experience. (shrink)
An influential interpretation of phenomenology construes Husserl's project as an attempt to generalize the Fregean notion of sense- an attempt to extend Frege's analysis of the structure of meaningful expressions to a more general account of the structure of meaning in experience . Michael Dummett has articulated a broadly Fregean critique of this Husserlian program, arguing that the project is misguided and retrograde-a relapse into the psychologism and idealism that Frege sought to avoid. A defense of Husserl is offered, based (...) in part on key elements of the theory of meaning articulated in his Logical Investigations . But the main aim is neither to acquit nor to convict Husserl of Dummett's charges; rather it is to use the exchange to investigate some of the philosophical commitments of a broadly Husserlian phenomenology. If we are to understand how Husserl avoids psychologism then we must come to terms with the paradoxical idea of an anti-psychologistic investigation of consciousness (an anti-psychologistic psychology). If we are to understand his complex stance toward idealism then we must not only understand the grounds for his rejection of subjective idealism but also be attuned to the other forms of idealism to which his project is committed. In the course of investigating these matters the author considers how Husserl can reply to the charge of explanatory vacuity, and shows that Frege himself recognizes the legitimacy of something like the Husserlian project. (shrink)
