Philosophical Investigations, Volume 45, Issue 2, Page 220-223, April 2022.

"Fénelon is arguably the most neglected of all the major philosophers of early modernity. His political masterwork was the most-read book in eighteenth-century France after the Bible, yet to now we have lacked a single interpretive monograph in English devoted specifically to his thought. This monograph aims to correct this by providing the first such book-length study. In focusing specifically on Fénelon's political thought, it has three primary aims. The first is to provide a reconstruction of Fénelon's political ideas accessible (...) to those who might be encountering Fénelon directly or at length for the first time. The second is to demonstrate the connections between Fénelon's political thought and several other fields to which he made significant and long-recognized contributions, including not only philosophy and political science but also economics, education, literature, theology, and spirituality. Third, the book aims to cut several new edges in our extant understanding and appreciation of Fénelon's political thought and its significance. On this front, it specifically argues that Fénelon is better understood as a moderate and modern thinker rather than as a radical or reactionary, and that Fénelon deserves to be seen not merely as a political thinker but as a political philosopher. Finally, The Political Philosophy of Fénelon argues for Fénelon's relevance to our political world today. Fénelon was a nuanced and insightful diagnostician of ills from egocentrism and social atomism to authoritarianism and imperialism, and our understanding of these phenomena so familiar to us today can benefit from attending to his insights"--. (shrink)

This essay examines Friedman's recent approach to the analysis of physical theories. Friedman argues against Quine that the identification of certain principles as ‘constitutive’ is essential to a satisfactory methodological analysis of physics. I explicate Friedman's characterization of a constitutive principle, and I evaluate his account of the constitutive principles that Newtonian and Einsteinian gravitation presuppose for their formulation. I argue that something close to Friedman's thesis is defensible.

I examine two claims that arise in Brown’s account of inertial motion. Brown claims there is something objectionable about the way in which the motions of free particles in Newtonian theory and special relativity are coordinated. Brown also claims that since a geodesic principle can be derived in Einsteinian gravitation, the objectionable feature is explained away. I argue that there is nothing objectionable about inertia and that while the theorems that motivate Brown’s second claim can be said to figure in (...) a deductive-nomological explanation, their main contribution lies in their explication rather than their explanation of inertial motion. (shrink)

Franz Brentano's claim to fame is the reintroduction of intentionality to the modern philosophy of mind. Hickerson's book offers new interpretations of a central philosophical concept employed in the Brentano School, arguing against the now-standard misreading of Brentano as Immanentist. The History of Intentionality is a continuing history and will be valuable to present-day specialists and students in phenomenology and the philosophy of mind.

In response to cancer, patients may be thrown into precarious processes of remaking their purpose, identity, and connections to the world around them. Thoughtful and thorough responses to these issues can be supported by person-centered phenomenological approaches to caring for patients. The importance of perspectives on illness offered by theoretical phenomenology will become apparent through the example of the experience of nausea, or perhaps more accurately put—chemo sickness. The focus here is on how chemo sickness alters one's way of relating (...) to the world. I will examine the phenomenon of nausea through the lens of the phenomenological concept of mood—an existential feeling that engenders a diffused tone permeating through one's world and shapes the envisioned possibilities on one's horizon. (shrink)

Although he did not invent the term, Jürgen Habermas has popularised “constitutional patriotism” as a form of political unity that avoids excessive nationalism. This paper attempts to examine the link between emotivism and normativity that has otherwise been excluded from Habermas’s notion of constitutional patriotism. Beyond Habermas, political theory as a whole has not yet taken emotivism as a serious component of normativity. Rather than developing it in isolation, this paper attempts to reconcile emotivism with cognitive-normative practices found within rational (...) deliberation. Reconciling the two not only provides a better normative steering component for judging good from bad practices, but also depicts contemporary political practices more accurately. In sum, constitutional patriotism’s normativity must be sourced from a complex integration of emotion and cognition, or put another way, from the interplay between citizens’ moral sentiments and rational judgements. (shrink)

This paper identifies experiential processes through which social structures become taken for granted, termed processes of “structure marginalization”. Passive processes of structure marginalization relegate social structures to the margin of experience without the use of higher-order cognitive acts such as evaluation and reflection. Examples include adapting to social structures via routine and habitual practices, a lack of conscious awareness of the complexity, historical formation, and other details of social structures, and rendering social structures irrelevant when they are unreflectively judged to (...) be of no value for achieving ends. Active processes of structure marginalization reflectively and discursively relegate social structures to marginal consciousness. Examples include the use of naturalistic and necessitarian explanations for the social order that implicitly justify it as inalterable or “just the way things are”, normative justifications for the status quo, and conscious awareness of one’s powerlessness to control social-structural conditions. Active processes of structure marginalization originate in passive processes. The goal of the typology is to explain, at the level of experience, why social structures typically remain unproblematic and unnoticed in everyday life, even during periods of social crisis and change or when existing structures produce harmful effects. (shrink)

This paper advances an interpretation of what Hume called ‘the general rules’: natural principles of belief-formation that nevertheless can be augmented via reflection. According to Hume, reflection is, in part, what separates the wise from the vulgar. In this paper, I argue that for Hume being wise must therefore be, to some degree, voluntary. Hume faced a significant problem in attempting to reconcile his epistemic normativity, i.e. his claims about what we ought to believe, with his largely involuntarist theory of (...) the mind. Reflection on the General Rules, and an interpretation of that reflection as voluntary, helps explain not only Hume's theory of belief, but also how he hoped to reconcile epistemic normativity with naturalism about the mental. (shrink)

To make Adorno’s difficult notion of “identity thinking” more amendable to sociological research, this project brings his Negative Dialectics into conversation with Schutz’s theory of typification. When revised with Adorno’s attention to political economy and the pathologies of reification, Schutz’s framework allows for an analysis of identity thinking in everyday life. Both theorists argue that categories of thought: automatically subsume objects for pragmatic yet socially conditioned reasons, are socially formed, transferred, and selected, and suppress particularizing characteristics of objects. Their overlapping (...) arguments are cross-fertilized to propose a critical approach to cognitive sociology that can engage in a form of ideology critique that illuminates forms of thinking that conceal social contradictions. This approach is useful for explaining the “mundane dialectic of enlightenment”: the daily reproduction of unreflective rationalization that breeds irrationality in the form of social domination and environmental harm, a contradiction which finds its ultimate expression in climate change inaction. (shrink)

ExcerptWhat would happiness be that was not measured by the immeasurable grief at what is? For the world is deeply ailing. Theodor Adorno, “Regressions,” Minima Moralia1Unfortunately, for the last half century many critical theorists have disregarded the founder of Critical Theory: Max Horkheimer. In the 1960s, Herbert Marcuse's popularity largely concealed the rest of the Frankfurt School. Today, Horkheimer is seen as a tardy pessimist in the wake of Walter Benjamin2 and, much too often, as a footnote to Theodor Adorno's (...) genius. Even the quintessential statement of the Frankfurt School, Dialectic of Enlightenment, has been…. (shrink)

: This paper advances an account of Twardowski as a representationalist. In particular, Twardowskian representationalism is a blend of what I call resemblance representationalism and mediator-content representationalism. It was not, I argue here, proxy-percept representationalism. Twardowski treated mental contents as "signs" or "quasi-pictures." Husserl was a well-known critic of this view. I additionally argue that Husserl's criticism is grounded in the claim that Twardowski conflated representational content with sensations. The distinction on which this Husserlian criticism rests is between the psychological (...) and ideal contents of consciousness, the cornerstone of the early Husserlian phenomenology. (shrink)

Questions have been raised on what role the knowledge provided by sustainability science actually plays in the transition to sustainability and what role it may play in the future. In this paper we investigate different approaches to sustainability transformation of food systems by analyzing the rationale behind transformative acts-the ground that the direct agents of change act upon- and how the type of rationale is connected to the role of research and how the agents of change are involved. To do (...) this we employ Max Weber’s distinction between instrumental rationality and value-rationality in social action. In particular, we compare two different approaches to the role of research in sustainability transformation: (1) Performance-based approaches that measure performance and set up sustainability indicator targets and benchmarks to motivate the agents in the food system to change; (2) Values-based approaches that aim at communicating and mediating sustainability values to enable coordinated and cooperative action to transform the food system. We identify their respective strengths and weaknesses based on a cross-case analysis of four cases, and propose that the two approaches, like Weber’s two types of rationality, are complementary-because they are based on complementary observer stances—and that an optimal in-between approach therefore cannot be found. However, there are options for reflexive learning by observing one perspective-and its possible blind spots-from the vantage point of the other, so we suggest that new strategies for sustainability transformation can be found based on reflexive rationality as a third and distinct type of rationality. (shrink)

The Hastings Center's chief advancement officer describes values and intellectual interests that undergird his work. “My job is itself collaborative in spirit,” Sauder writes. “My primary responsibility is to identify and build connections with a wide variety of people who value ethical decision‐making at the crossroads of health, science, and technology.”.

Learner Voice, Learner Choice offers fresh, forward-thinking supports for teachers creating an empowered, student-centered classroom. Learner agency is a major topic in today's schools, but what does it mean in practice, and how do these practices give students skills and opportunities they will need to thrive as citizens, parents, and workers in our ever-shifting climate? Showcasing authentic activities and classrooms, this book is full of diverse instructional experiences that will motivate your students to take an agile, adaptable role in their (...) own learning. This wealth of pedagogical ideas-from specific to open-ended, low-tech to digital, self-expressive to collaborative, creative to critical-will help you discover the transformative effects of providing students with ownership, agency, and choice in their learning journeys. (shrink)

Dieses Buch bietet die erste umfassende Auslegung von Schellings kontrovers beurteilter Schrift Philosophie und Religion. Ausgehend von Schellings Kunst der Darstellung und unter standiger Berucksichtigung der Einwande Eschenmayers, auf welche diese Schrift zu antworten sucht, zeichnet die Arbeit die Grundlinien von Schellings Denken um 1804 nach. Besonderes Gewicht liegt dabei auf Schellings Ansichten zu Freiheit, Ethik, Geschichte und Politik. Dabei zeigt sich, dass die Grundthesen der sogenannten Identitatsphilosophie, anders als allgemein angenommen, durchaus mit der Lehre der Freiheitsschrift vertraglich sind. Der (...) Autor versucht Philosophie und Religion als ein Dokument Politischer Philosophie lesbar zu machen, indem er aufzeigt, dass der politische Charakter des schellingschen Denkens nicht erst in einer ausgearbeiteten Theorie des Politischen zu suchen ist, sondern vielmehr bereits in der Form der Darstellung reflektiert ist, durch welche Schelling unterschiedlichen Adressaten Unterschiedliches mitzuteilen und einer politisch brisanten naturlichen Ungleichheit Rechnung zu tragen vermag. (shrink)

A sociological revision of Aron Gurwitsch provides a helpful layered theory of conscious experience as a four-domain structure: _the theme_, _the thematic field_, _the halo_, and _the social horizon_. The social horizon—the totality of the social world that is unknown, vaguely known, taken for granted, or ignored by the subject despite objectively influencing the thoughts and actions of the subject—, helps conceptualize how everyday human–computer interaction (HCI) can obscure social structures. Two examples illustrate the usefulness of this framework: (1) illuminating (...) new forms of social control known as “surveillance capitalism” that influence the other domains of consciousness despite being invisible to the subject and (2) explaining how computer use tends to “hide” the ecological impacts of digital-technological systems from the attention of subjects. A sociological four-domain theory of consciousness supplements ethnomethodological HCI research by preserving the field’s long-standing focus on micro-level interactions and user experience while simultaneously drawing attention to a “commonsense ignorance of social structure”—in this case, the invisibility of the social structures behind personal computer use. Social structure can be reproduced even when actors are unaware of engaging in its reproduction. (shrink)

Durkheim’s claim in Suicide that humanity’s ‘inextinguishable thirst’ (soif inextinguible) causes suffering was adopted from Arthur Schopenhauer’s argument that the will-to-live’s ‘unquenchable thirst’ (unlöschbaren Durst) causes suffering, which was previously adopted from the Buddha’s argument that ‘ceaselessly recurring thirst’ (tṛṣṇā) causes suffering. This article retraces this demonstrable though seemingly unlikely history of ideas and reveals that the philosophical underpinnings of Durkheim’s theory of anomie are rooted, through Schopenhauer, whose thought influenced many thinkers during the Neo-Romantic fin de siècle period, including (...) Durkheim, in the Buddha’s Second Noble Truth – a doctrine made available to Schopenhauer in European translations of Buddhist texts during the previous turn of the century’s ‘Oriental Renaissance’. By achieving a more thorough understanding of the ambiguous concept of anomie through its Eastern intellectual origins, this project shows that the common conceptualization of anomie as ‘normlessness’ is inconsequential without presupposing that humans thirst and unconstrained thirst causes pain. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie Jahrgang: 99 Heft: 4 Seiten: 380-404.

This reply to my five generous and insightful critics – Gianna Englert, David Williams, Alexandra Oprea, Geneviève Rousslière, and Brandon Turner – focuses on three key issues they raise: the relat...

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 29, Issue 1, Page 105-119, March 2021.

For a book that implores its readers to “simplify, simplify,” Walden has more than its fair share of obscurity. Lovers of simplicity have long mined it for its clear and comforting maxims, only to leave behind more than a few tough nuts for those who incline towards the esoteric—which, for Thoreau, is the essence of the philosophical. To the former set of readers he offers an apology: “You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than (...) in most men’s, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature.” To the latter he offers advice: “Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.” The mysteries of the best books, Thoreau insists, are revealed only to those who, through their patience and persistence, prove themselves worthy of their teachings. “The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have” (p. 83). Thoreau’s Walden, I mean to show, was both conceived and meant to be read as just such a heroic book, not only because of its author’s “epic ambition” to create a national literature, but also because a unique understanding of heroism is the subject of its most esoteric chapters. (shrink)

Martha Nussbaum's latest book is a lucid and accessible study of a concept with clear contemporary relevance. In an age of resurgent nationalism, a study of the idea and ideals of cosmopolitanism is remarkably timely. But this is hardly a mere tract for the times; as its acknowledgments note, parts of the book date back to 2000. And ultimately, for all its timeliness, this is a scholarly rather than a popular study of "the long tradition of cosmopolitan political thought" and (...) the ways this tradition can help inform current debates in political philosophy.Nussbaum's book is organized into seven chapters. The first lays out the core idea of the cosmopolitan tradition: the Cynic/Stoic insight "that politics... (shrink)

ABSTRACT David Hume and Adam Smith are often regarded as preeminent contributors to the eighteenth-century Scottish ‘science of man.’ For our understanding of Hume’s and Smith’s contributions to this project, scholars today are especially indebted to Nicholas Phillipson, who influentially and persuasively demonstrated how the science of man that they developed sought to account for social progress as the result of man’s natural love of improvement in the face of conditions of indigence and want. Yet Phillipson’s work also helps us (...) see the ways in which the Scottish science of man sought to account for man’s moral development as well as our material development, and specifically the ways in which individual human beings come to develop virtue. This contribution thus extends Phillipson’s pioneering insights into the methodology of the Scottish science of man to show how Smith conceived of the love of improvement not only as the engine driving society towards civilization and opulence, but also as an important element in the ethical development of the individual. (shrink)

Discusses the relationship between popular music and literature in conjunction with the connection between high and low art.

Smythies and Ramachandran claim that the direct realist theory of perception has been refuted by recent psychophysics. This paper takes up the psychophysics, and the definition of direct realism employed by Smythies and Ramachandran, to show that direct realism has not been so refuted. I argue that the direct realist may grant that perceptual images are constructed by the central nervous system, without treating those images as “phenomenal objects.” Until phenomenal objects are shown to be distinct from extra-mental objects, and (...) the only objects of perception properly so-called, the direct realist will remain generally edified by the relevant psychophysics. (shrink)

Alva Noë is a modern-day empiricist. His book Action in Perception is chockablock with contemporary cognitive science; its preface and notes (not to mention general erudition) point to on-going collaboration with Evan Thompson, Kevin O’Regan, and Susan Hurley. Their research investigates the sensorimotor bases of consciousness, and Action in Perception is offered as its philosophical backdrop. As such, the book presents a series of ideas and interpretations that constitute what Noë calls the “enactive approach” to perception, many of which are (...) explicitly phenomenological in orientation. So those on the lookout for imaginative philosophy of mind will find Noë's work particularly compelling. (Noë would prefer "already feeling about for imaginative philosophy of mind," because on his account paradigmatic perceptual activity is tactile rather than visual.) In this review I will not address the empirical details concerning Noë and his compatriots, but will instead focus on the way Noë’s enactive approach should be situated vis-à-vis traditional phenomenology. Action in Perception is part of the grand project of a robustly scientific knowledge of human perceptual experience, but it is clearly also a philosophical theory, so I will address it philosophically. I address it as I take it to be: one of the best works in the philosophy of perception to appear in a very long time. (shrink)

This paper claims that the argument Heidegger leveled at Husserl in his Marburg lecture courses trades on a confusion. Heidegger confused neglecting the question of being with presupposing an answer to the question of being. No reasons have been given for thinking that the former is objectionable, and the latter is only as objectionable as the thing presupposed. This paper does not, thereby, show Heideggerian phenomenology is inferior to Husserlian phenomenology; but it does show that Heidegger's so-called “immanent critique of (...) Husserl” was anything but, and hence that Husserlian phenomenology was not (as Heidegger claimed) “unphenomenological”. (shrink)

Normal.dotm 0 0 1 50 252 Kansas State University 4 1 352 12.0 0 false 18 pt 18 pt 0 0 false false false /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman";} My task in this paper is twofold. On the one hand, I want to provide an account of Twardowski’s treatment of content , as can be found in his book Zur Lehre vom Inhalt und (...) Gegenstand der Vorstellungen (1894). On the other hand, I wish to make a suggestion about the kind of representationalist Twardowski was. Normal.dotm 0 0 1 19 98 Kansas State University 1 1 137 12.0 0 false 18 pt 18 pt 0 0 false false false /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman";} I will devote most of my attention to motivating Twardowski's theory. In conclusion I will provide a defense of the theory. (shrink)

Brentano and his students were the first to wrestle an Aristotelian perceptual concept, intentionality, into the modern metaphysics of mind. This dissertation recovers theories of Franz Brentano , Kazimierz Twardowski , and Edmund Husserl by appreciating each as an unique attempt to make a modern home for the ancient doctrine of "aboutness." The dissertation corrects a broad range of contemporary misunderstandings and criticisms of Brentano School philosophy, in particular one advanced by Martin Heidegger . ;Brentano's Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (...) is marked by deep tensions between the doctrine of intentional inexistence and its Comtean positivism; Brentano treated mental contents as Comtean phenomena. Understanding physical phenomena as facts presented by sensations, and as syntactic building-blocks for higher-order mental phenomena, I reject misinterpretations of Brentano as either anti-reductionist or Immanentist. The unstable Brentanian account of intentionality was inherited by his student Twardowski. On the Content and Object of Presentations hoped to shore up Brentano's position with a crisp distinction of mental contents from worldly objects; Twardowski was among the first to attempt to integrate intentionality with a modern representationalism. The result was subjective mental content through which objects in the extra-conscious world are represented, a watershed in the history of representationalisms. Twardowski treated the representational relation as resemblance and mental contents as " quasi pictures," but Twardowski was among the first distinctly 20th Century representationalists, those who treat mental content as extra-conscious. Husserl's solution to Brentano's problem rejected the positivistic phenomena of his teacher and criticized the quasi-pictures of his classmate. The heart of the Logical Investigations account of consciousness is a distinction between two kinds of mental content. The intentional objects of the world at large are our mental contents , the very things that remain fixed while our mental contents fluctuate. Understanding this dynamic relation between two kinds of mental content, I reject readings of the Investigations which treat ideal content as either Fregean or Aristotelian. The recovery of Husserl's notion of ideality, one strategy amongst several in attempts to integrate intentionality with modern metaphysics, abets a defense of early Husserlian phenomenology from one of its most powerful critics. (shrink)

From the bestselling authors of The Daily Stoic comes an inspiring guide to the lives of the Stoics, and what the ancients can teach us about happiness, success, resilience and virtue. Nearly 2,300 years after a ruined merchant named Zeno first established a school on the Stoa Poikile of Athens, Stoicism has found a new audience among those who seek greatness, from athletes to politicians and everyone in between. It's no wonder; the philosophy and its embrace of self-mastery, virtue, and (...) indifference to that which we cannot control is as urgent today as it was in the chaos of the Roman Empire. In Lives of the Stoics, Holiday and Hanselman present the fascinating lives of the men and women who strove to live by the timeless Stoic virtues of Courage. Justice. Temperance. Wisdom. Organized in digestible, mini-biographies of all the well-known--and not so well-known--Stoics, this book vividly brings home what Stoicism was like for the people who loved it and lived it, dusting off powerful lessons to be learned from their struggles and successes. More than a mere history book, every example in these pages, from Epictetus to Marcus Aurelius--slaves to emperors--is designed to help the reader apply philosophy in their own lives. Holiday and Hanselman unveil the core values and ideas that unite figures from Seneca to Cato to Cicero across the centuries. Among them are the idea that self-rule is the greatest empire, that character is fate; how Stoics benefit from preparing not only for success, but failure; and learn to love, not merely accept, the hand they are dealt in life. A treasure of valuable insights and stories, this book can be visited again and again by any reader in search of inspiration from the past. (shrink)

From the bestselling authors of The Daily Stoic comes an inspiring guide to the lives of the Stoics, and what the ancients can teach us about happiness, success, resilience and virtue. Nearly 2,300 years after a ruined merchant named Zeno first established a school on the Stoa Poikile of Athens, Stoicism has found a new audience among those who seek greatness, from athletes to politicians and everyone in between. It's no wonder; the philosophy and its embrace of self-mastery, virtue, and (...) indifference to that which we cannot control is as urgent today as it was in the chaos of the Roman Empire. In Lives of the Stoics, Holiday and Hanselman present the fascinating lives of the men and women who strove to live by the timeless Stoic virtues of Courage. Justice. Temperance. Wisdom. Organized in digestible, mini-biographies of all the well-known--and not so well-known--Stoics, this book vividly brings home what Stoicism was like for the people who loved it and lived it, dusting off powerful lessons to be learned from their struggles and successes. More than a mere history book, every example in these pages, from Epictetus to Marcus Aurelius--slaves to emperors--is designed to help the reader apply philosophy in their own lives. Holiday and Hanselman unveil the core values and ideas that unite figures from Seneca to Cato to Cicero across the centuries. Among them are the idea that self-rule is the greatest empire, that character is fate; how Stoics benefit from preparing not only for success, but failure; and learn to love, not merely accept, the hand they are dealt in life. A treasure of valuable insights and stories, this book can be visited again and again by any reader in search of inspiration from the past. (shrink)