In Rousseau, Nietzsche, and the Image of the Human Paul Franco explores the relationship between Nietzsche and Rousseau and their critique of modern life. Franco begins by arguing that "among philosophers, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Friedrich Nietzsche are perhaps the two most influential explorers and shapers of the moral and cultural imagination of late modernity." And yet Nietzsche was often highly critical of Rousseau. Indeed, their critiques of modern life differ in important respects. Rousseau focused on the growing (...) political and economic inequality in modern society and proposed a more egalitarian politics. Nietzsche decried the inability of society to take account of the exceptional individual and found Rousseau's political ideas wrong-headed. It is Franco's objective to explore their critiques of the modern life they observed--in the mid 18th century of the French Enlightenment and the late 19th century of industrializing and increasingly secular and scientific Europe--and show how they differed and how the earlier thinker formed the basis of much of the later thinkers' ideas. (shrink)

In this paper, I look at Susan Stebbing’s articles and reviews that critically engage logical positivism. These appeared before the publication of A.J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic and helped shape the early British reception of logical positivism. I highlight Stebbing’s adoption of G.E. Moore’s tripartite distinction between knowing a proposition, understanding it, and giving an analysis of it and, in light of this distinction, her focus on whether the principle of verifiability can ground a plausible account of communication. Stebbing (...) thinks not, and I reconstruct her reasons, as well as her own account of communication. In doing this, I relate her criticisms to her rejection of methodological solipsism and her dissatisfaction with the logical positivist treatment of statements about other minds and the past. I also argue that Stebbing’s work provides a bridge to later criticisms of logical positivism from ordinary language philosophers. Foregrounding Stebbing’s engagement with logical positivism, especially her focus on communication, paints a fuller picture of how the logical positivists came to be part of analytic philosophy despite having different concerns than many of the British philosophers engaging their work. (shrink)

This article motivates a shift in certain strands of the debate over legitimate roles for nonepistemic values in scientific practice from investigating what is involved in taking cognitive attitudes like acceptance toward an empirical hypothesis to looking at a social understanding of assertion, the act of communicating that hypothesis. I argue that speech act theory’s account of assertion as a type of doing makes salient legitimate roles nonepistemic values can play in scientific practice. The article also shows how speech act (...) theory might provide a framework for fruitfully extending aspects of the social and pragmatic turns in the philosophy of science. (shrink)

Hegel offers perhaps the most profound and systematic modern attempt to understand the state as the realization of human freedom. In this examination of the philosopher’s ideas on freedom, Paul Franco focuses particularly on G. W. F. Hegel’s masterpiece, Philosophy of Right. Franco traces the development of Hegel’s ideas and relates them to modern political theory.

I draw upon speech act theory to understand the speech acts appropriate to the multiple aims of scientific practice and the role of nonepistemic values in evaluating speech acts made relative to those aims. First, I look at work that distinguishes explaining from describing within scientific practices. I then argue speech act theory provides a framework to make sense of how explaining, describing, and other acts have different felicity conditions. Finally, I argue that if explaining aims to convey understanding to (...) particular audiences rather than describe literally across all contexts, then evaluating explanatory acts directed to the public or policymakers involves asking nonepistemic questions. (shrink)

Recent work in the history of philosophy of science details the Kantianism of philosophers often thought opposed to one another, e.g., Hans Reichenbach, C.I. Lewis, Rudolf Carnap, and Thomas Kuhn. Historians of philosophy of science in the last two decades have been particularly interested in the Kantianism of Reichenbach, Carnap, and Kuhn, and more recently, of Lewis. While recent historical work focuses on recovering the threatened-to-be-forgotten Kantian themes of early twentieth-century philosophy of science, we should not elide the differences between (...) the Kantian strands running throughout this work. In this paper, I disentangle a few of these strands in the work of Reichenbach and Lewis focusing especially on their theories of relativized, constitutive a priori principles in empirical knowledge. In particular, I highlight three related differences between Reichenbach and Lewis concerning their motivations in analyzing scientific knowledge and scientific practice, their differing conceptions of constitutivity, and their relativization of constitutive a priori principles. In light of these differences, I argue Lewis’s Kantianism is more similar to Kuhn’s Kantianism than Reichenbach’s, and so might be of more contemporary relevance to social and practice-based approaches to the philosophy of science. (shrink)

I explore three points about the relationship between C.I. Lewis’s conceptual pragmatism and W.V. Quine’s naturalized epistemology inspired by Robert Sinclair’s Quine, Conceptual Pragmatism, and the Analytic-Synthetic Distinction. First, I highlight Lewis’s long-standing commitment to Platonism about meaning and its connection to his reflective philosophical method and rejection of a linguistic account of analyticity. Second, I consider Sinclair’s claim that “Lewis’s epistemology provides no indication concerning how, despite different sensory experiences, we still come to agree on what we are talking (...) about and what counts as evidence” (2022, 113). I find more hints, especially in Lewis’s account of how we verify that two people share meaning in common. However, some of the pragmatic and broadly empirical factors Lewis appeals to are not part of Quine’s naturalized epistemology. Finally, I relate these points to Quine’s (1953/1980) claim to advance a more “thorough pragmatism” than Lewis. Quine does not say much about action, value, and ethics, but these are central parts of Lewis’s conceptual pragmatism and a source of his reluctance to abandon those parts of his epistemology that Sinclair argues Quine found dispensable. (shrink)

"Human, All Too Human" and the problem of culture -- "Daybreak" and the campaign against morality -- "The Gay Science" and the incorporation of knowledge -- The later works: beyond the free spirit.

In GS, Nietzsche utters for the first time the paradoxical formula that sums up a good deal of his ethical thought: "What does your conscience say?—'You should become who you are'".1 The paradox, of course, lies in the odd juxtaposition of becoming and being: how can one become what one already is? Nietzsche repeats the formula toward the end of the original edition of GS, connecting it explicitly to the idea of self-creation: "We, however, want to become who we are—human (...) beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves!". What exactly such self-creation involves for Nietzsche, how it relates to "who we are," and whether it ultimately coheres as a... (shrink)

This article compares the political philosophies of Michael Oakeshott and Isaiah Berlin, probably the two most important political philosophers in postwar Britain, who, strangely, had very little to do with one another during their illustrious careers. The article focuses on their respective critiques of rationalism and theories of liberal pluralism, arguing that Oakeshott provides the more consistent and philosophically satisfying account in both instances.

This article compares the political philosophies of Michael Oakeshott and Isaiah Berlin, probably the two most important political philosophers in postwar Britain, who, strangely, had very little to do with one another during their illustrious careers. The article focuses on their respective critiques of rationalism and theories of liberal pluralism, arguing that Oakeshott provides the more consistent and philosophically satisfying account in both instances.

Taking a cue from remarks Thomas Kuhn makes in 1990 about the historical turn in philosophy of science, I examine the history of history and philosophy of science within parts of the British philosophical context in the 1950s and early 1960s. During this time, ordinary language philosophy's influence was at its peak. I argue that the ordinary language philosophers' methodological recommendation to analyze actual linguistic practice influences several prominent criticisms of the deductive-nomological model of scientific explanation and that these criticisms (...) relate to the historical turn in philosophy of science. To show these connections, I primarily examine the work of Stephen Toulmin, who taught at Oxford from 1949 to 1954, and Michael Scriven, who completed a dissertation on explanation under Gilbert Ryle and R.B. Braithwaite in 1956. I also consider Mary Hesse's appeal to an ordinary language-influenced account of meaning in her account of the role of models and analogies in scientific reasoning, and W.H. Watson's Wittgensteinian philosophy of science, an early influence on Toulmin. I think there are two upshots to my historical sketch. First, it fills out details of the move away from logical positivism to more historical- and practice-focused philosophies of science. Second, questions about linguistic meaning and the proper targets and aims of philosophical analysis are part and parcel of the historical turn, as well as its reception. Looking at the philosophical background during which so-called linguistic philosophers also had a hand in bringing these questions to prominence helps us understand why. (shrink)

In this book Paul Franco provides an authoritative introduction to the life and thought of Michael Oakeshott, one of the most important philosophical voices of the twentieth century. After sketching a brief biography of Oakeshott, Franco then examines his most distinctive ideas, including his early idealist theory of knowledge, his influential critique of rationalism and central social planning, and his liberal theory of civil association. Though best known as a political philosopher, Oakeshott also made significant contributions to (...) the philosophy of history, aesthetics, the philosophy of religion, and the philosophy of education. Franco highlights Oakeshott’s impressive achievements in each of these areas. His book is an essential introduction to the whole range of Oakeshott’s thought, and it sets the philosopher’s work in historical context while also demonstrating its relevance to contemporary debates in political philosophy. (shrink)

Michael Oakeshott has long been recognized as one of the most important political philosophers of the twentieth century, but until now no single volume has been able to examine all the facets of his wide-ranging philosophy with sufficient depth, expertise, and authority. The essays collected here cover all aspects of Oakeshott’s thought, from his theory of knowledge and philosophies of history, religion, art, and education to his reflections on morality, politics, and law. The volume provides an authoritative and synoptic guide (...) to one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. (shrink)

In this paper, I fill out the received view of logical positivism within professional philosophy against which Thomas Kuhn’s Structure appeared. To do this, I look at the methodological dimensions of ordinary language criticisms of logical positivist analysis from P.F. Strawson and J.L. Austin. While no one would confuse Strawson and Austin for philosophers of science, I look to their criticisms given the general porousness of sub-disciplinary boundaries in mid-20th century philosophy, the prominence of ordinary language philosophy in the 1950s, (...) and also because Kuhn was likely aware of their criticisms via Stanley Cavell. Their main charge is that the positivists base their ideal language analysis on an impoverished, yet overreaching account of meaning because they ignore ordinary linguistic practices. I then show how these methodological criticisms run parallel to points Kuhn makes against logical positivist approaches to the study of scientific knowledge. The parallels I draw emphasize methodological, rather than doctrinal dissatisfaction in mid-20th century philosophy with logical positivism’s perceived neglect of linguistic and scientific practices. An insight shared by these parallel criticisms is that logical positivists cannot declare linguistic and scientific practices irrelevant to their philosophical aims without an antecedent investigation of the practices under question. (shrink)

This article compares the political philosophies of Michael Oakeshott and Isaiah Berlin, probably the two most important political philosophers in postwar Britain, who, strangely, had very little to do with one another during their illustrious careers. The article focuses on their respective critiques of rationalism and theories of liberal pluralism, arguing that Oakeshott provides the more consistent and philosophically satisfying account in both instances.

Sympathetic commentators on Kant’s account of physical knowledge agree that while philosophy of science has much to gain from Kant’s notion of constitutive a priori principles, Kant’s conceptual and methodological resources are inconsistent with the possibility of scientific change. In this article, I argue that this received view is lacking since Kant’s claim that a unique set of a priori principles structures our knowledge for all time is not central to his account of the constitutive a priori. Two underemphasized points (...) of Kant’s theory bear this out. First, Kant applies ‘a priori’ widely to include non-truth-evaluable elements of knowledge. As such, Kant primarily understands the necessity that attaches to these elements in light of the constitutive role they play in knowledge rather than in terms of truth for all time. Second, Kant uses two methods to establish the existence of constitutive a priori principles: the analytic and the synthetic. On my interpretation, while scientific change has discredited the analytic method, the synthetic method remains viable. In this way, I offer a new perspective on the ways in which Kant’s theory of the constitutive a priori can ground Neo-Kantian philosophies of science like those of Hans Reichenbach and Michael Friedman. (shrink)

There was a time in the not too distant past when one would be obliged to begin a review like this with a comment about the relative neglect of Nietzsche’s middle works, HH, D, and GS. That time now seems to be well behind us. In recent years, there has been a spate of scholarly books devoted to these works, including Ruth Abbey’s Nietzsche’s Middle Period, Michael Ure’s Nietzsche’s Therapy: Self-Cultivation in the Middle Works, Jonathan Cohen’s Science, Culture, and Free (...) Spirits: A Study of Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human, Monika Langer’s Nietzsche’s Gay Science (New York: Palgrave... (shrink)