20th Century Philosophy

In this article, it is claimed that by considering Rancière’s understanding of politics of aesthetics alongside Stengers’ conception of the ecology of practices, it is possible to think about the autonomy of artistic practices which would be created and sustained politically. Rancière demonstrates that the artistic autonomy was previously subordinated to a variety of historical imperatives, while Stengers warns about an apolitical mission of the great narrative of the Anthropocene. Both philosophers make a case for talking about the autonomy of (...) artistic practices based on political differing, but in Stengers’ philosophy, the political principle of dissensus is supported by an ecological perspective. She argues for a symbiotic consensus, where the political is defined as being both contradictory and attuned to the situational interconnectedness. In the destructive environment of the Anthropocene, Stengers challenges the tradition of critical reflexivity and proposes a way out – the autonomy of practices that is not universally given but needs to be constantly recomposed together. (shrink)

In The Problems of Philosophy, Bertrand Russell presents a justification of induction based on a principle he refers to as “the principle of induction”. Owing to the ambiguity of the notion of probability, the principle of induction may be interpreted in two different ways. If interpreted in terms of the subjective interpretation of probability, the principle of induction may be known a priori to be true. But it is unclear how this should give us any confidence in our use of (...) induction, since induction is applied to the external world outside our minds. If the principle is interpreted in light of the objective interpretation of induction, it cannot be known to be true a priori, since it applies to frequencies that occur in the world outside the mind, and these cannot be known without recourse to experience. Russell’s principle of induction therefore fails to provide a satisfactory justification of induction. (shrink)

Carnap’s seminal ‘Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology’ makes important use of the notion of a framework and the related distinction between internal and external questions. But what exactly is a framework? And what role does the internal/external distinction play in Carnap’s metaontology? In an influential series of papers, Matti Eklund has recently defended a bracingly straightforward interpretation: A Carnapian framework, Eklund says, is just a natural language. To ask an internal question, then, is just to ask a question in, say, English. (...) To try to ask an external question is to try, absurdly, to ask a question in no language at all. Finding that so trivial an I/E distinction can’t help to explain Carnap’s deflationary metaontology, Eklund is led to attribute to Carnap a view he calls ontological pluralism. In this paper, I show that Eklund misreads Carnap, and I argue that this misreading obscures fundamental features of Carnap’s philosophy. I then defend an account of frameworks as what Carnap called semantical systems, and I place this account in the context of Carnap’s philosophical program of explication. Finally, I discuss the role that frameworks and the I/E distinction play in ESO, showing that ESO provides no reason to attribute the doctrine of ontological pluralism to Carnap. (shrink)

This paper is a history of philosophy in Australia in the first decade of the twenty-first century. It considers, among other things: (1) the state of the higher education sector; (2) the state of the humanities; (3) the state of philosophy in the academy; (4) support for philosophy in the academy; (5) the role of philosophy beyond the academy; (6) changes in philosophical practice in this decade,; (7) changes in the teaching of philosophy in this decade; and (8) the domains (...) of inquiry in which philosophers worked in this decade. (shrink)

In §442 of Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein criticizes the application of Russell’s theory of descriptions to the sentence in the title without mentioning Russell or his theory. Wittgenstein is making a general point of wider interest. I have two aims. The first is to situate Wittgenstein’s critique within the larger theoretical setting of Russell’s theory of descriptions and Frege’s theory of indirect reference in light of the familiar problem of quantifying into attitude contexts. The second is to draw broader methodological implications (...) from the foregoing for how best to think of the role of individual semantic paraphrases within the formal semantic study of natural language. (shrink)

Is suffering really bad? The late Derek Parfit argued that we all have reasons to want to avoid future agony and that suffering is in itself bad both for the one who suffers and impersonally. Nietzsche denied that suffering was intrinsically bad and that its value could even be impersonal. This paper has two aims. It argues against what I call ‘Realism about the Value of Suffering’ by drawing from a broadly Nietzschean debunking of our evaluative attitudes, showing that a (...) recently influential response to the debunking challenge (the appeal to phenomenal introspection) fails. It also argues that a Nietzschean approach is well suited to support the challenge and is bolstered by the empirical literature. As strangers to ourselves, we cannot know whether suffering is really intrinsically bad for us. (shrink)

According to a familiar line of thinking, hallucination reveals that what we take to be direct experiences of the world are in fact mere appearances: appearances which give only mediate and unreliable testimony to reality. If we wish to secure knowledge of the world, we must transition to a different register, that of reason and judgment. In this classical analysis, non-normal perception functions to show the deficit of normal perception. Merleau-Ponty offers a strikingly different account of hallucination. Far from inciting (...) skeptical concerns, Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of hallucination in the Phenomenology of Perception in fact leads him to his first sustained account of perceptual faith. Perceptual faith, as our primary bond with the world, is at the heart of Merleau-Ponty’s response to skepticism, and it underlies both perception and hallucination. In this article, I show how this surprising analysis of hallucination is possible. (shrink)

Článek se zabývá dějinami střetu mezi analytickou a kontinentální tradicí, který dominoval filozofii 20. století. I když obě tradice vzešly ze stejného intelektuálního prostředí a byly výrazně ovlivněny novokantovstvím, přesto se jejich vzájemné neporozumění postupem času prohlubovalo a při několika příležitostech situace přerostla v otevřené nepřátelství. V článku je popsáno deset nejzávažnějších konfliktů: Russell vs. Bergson, Schlick vs. Husserl, Carnap vs. Heidegger, Ryle vs. Heidegger, Popperova kritika pseudovědy, konference v Royaumont, Searle vs. Derrida, odhalení Heideggerovy nacistické minulosti, Derridův čestný doktorát (...) z Cambridge a Sokalův podvrh. Na počátku 21. století se ukazuje, že rozepře analytické a kontinentální filozofie se vyčerpala. Mnohem podstatnější je spor o samotnou metodologii filozofie, jenž se projevuje v rozhraní mezi naturalisticky a antinaturalisticky zaměřenými mysliteli. (shrink)

Desires are contentful mental states. But what determines the content of a desire? Two different classic answers were proposed by Russell and by Wittgenstein, starting in the 1910s. Russell proposed a behaviorist account according to which the content of the desire is fixed by the type of state that puts an end to the relevant kind of behavior which was triggered by some initial discomfort. The desire’s content consists in its “satisfaction conditions”. Wittgenstein criticized such an account for neglecting the (...) crucial point that the relation between a desire and its content is a conceptual, internal one, not an external contingent one. Desires specify their own contents, their “fulfillment conditions”. Even though there is a lot to say in favor of Wittgenstein’s criticism, this paper argues that Russell pointed at an important aspect of desires which plays a crucial role for accounts of self-knowledge of one’s own desires. It turns out that fulfillment conditions and satisfaction conditions are tied together in rational self-knowledge of one’s own desires. In this sense, the views of Russell and Wittgenstein can be combined in a fruitful way. (shrink)

Thomas Kuhn was never a player in the contemporary realism/anti-realism debates, the debate that gained momentum around 1980 or so, with the publication of Bas van Fraassen’s Scientific Image and Larry Laudan’s “Confutation of Convergent Realism”. But I argue that Kuhn had a significant influence on these debates. Kuhn played a significant role in focusing philosophers’ attention on a different issue than the focus of the realism/anti-realism debate of the 1950s and 1960s. Instead of focusing on the meaning of theoretical (...) terms, philosophers of science turned their attention to the problems raised by changes of theory. The particular shape of the contemporary debate thus owes something to the publication of Structure of Scientific Revolutions. (shrink)

In this paper, I attempt to clarify the heart of Dewey’s philosophy: his method (denotative method (DM) / pattern of inquiry (PI)). Despite the traditional understanding of Dewey as anti-foundationalist, I want to show that Dewey did have metaphysical foundations for his method: the principle of continuity or theory of emergentism. I also argue that Dewey’s metaphysical position is better named as ‘cultural emergentism’, rather than his own term ‘cultural naturalism’. What Dewey called ‘common sense’ in his Logic, Husserl termed (...) as the ‘life-world’ in his Crisis. I compare two perspectives of dealing with the phenomenon and conclude that for Dewey, the difference between natural sciences and the common sense inquiry is that of subject-matter but not of method. Thus, the goal is to find the unified method to be applied in both domains. Whereas Husserl was more pessimistic: for him, the difference was not only in subject-matter, but in the very methods. Following that discussion, I also attempt to reformulate the hard problem of consciousness in Deweyan terms. In the end, I compare Dewey’s DM / PI with Popper’s understandings of scientific method and conclude that there is no significant difference between the two and that Dewey’s method could also be looked at as hypothetic-deductive method, with the only difference in emphases. (shrink)

In this essay, I link Pragmatism and the philosophy of liberation by making a comparison between John Dewey’s concept of the public and Enrique Dussel’s concept of the pueblo. I am specifically interested in how these concepts set up the relationship between intellectuals and their constituency—the community from which their thought emerges and to which they take themselves to be responsible. Reading the public and the pueblo together, I emphasize the need for intellectuals to consider further how their scholarship affects (...) those they claim to serve. I conclude via what AnaLouise Keating calls “risking the personal”—offering some autobiographical remarks on the questions I raise below. (shrink)

El presente texto de Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003) apareció por primera vez en una traducción al italiano de Guido Neri bajo el título “II nome Berlino” [El nombre Berlín], publicado en 1964 en la revista literaria dirigida por Elio Vittorini e Italo Calvino Il menabó 7, año 6, pp. 121-25. El texto original en francés se extravió y, con la autorización del propio Blanchot, Hélène Jelen y Jean-Luc Nancy tradujeron la versión italiana al francés para publicarla en 1983 como “Le Nom (...) de Berlin” en una edición bilingüe. Desde entonces, la versión francesa ha sido reimpresa múltiples veces: en Cafe 3 (1983), 43-6; Berlin, collection Libération, 4 (1989); y Po&sie 52 (1990), 6-8. El texto fue finalmente republicado con su nombre original en francés, es decir, “Berlin” para la publicación de la traducción cuatrilingüe francés, inglés, ruso y alemán) aparecida en 1994 en MLN, Vol. 109, No. 3, German Issue (Apr.), The Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 345-355. Se ha decidido traducir este texto también en lengua hispana por su innegable actualidad y peculiar claridad. En él no se trata exclusivamente sobre la realidad política, económica y lingüística de Berlín (o de Alemania) durante la Guerra Fría. Las reflexiones de Blanchot permanecen tan vigentes como el fenómeno que aquí decide enfrentar en sus múltiples aspectos: los fundamentos mismos de la política y el Estado en la modernidad. Para esta primera traducción al castellano del texto se ha tomado como referencia la versión de Jelen y Nancy antes mencionada. (shrink)

Language is indisputably in some sense a social phenomenon. But in which sense? Philosophical conceptions of language often assume a simple relationship between individual speakers and a language community, one of which is attributed primacy and used to understand the other. Having identified some problems faced by two such conceptions—social holism and individualism—this article outlines an alternative phenomenological view of shared language by focusing on two principal ways that language is shared. First, it draws on the late Wittgenstein to characterize (...) how shared practices ground linguistic communities. Based on the link between language-games and corresponding subcommunities of language users, I argue that pragmatic language sharing is more fragmented than social holism suggests but more cohesive than individualism intimates. Second, it considers how linguistic community is grounded in shared sign systems. Merleau-Ponty’s appropriation of Husserl’s notion of institution is used to highlight that existing linguistic structures are adopted in an open process that allows varying degrees of differentiation. Combining these two perspectives, I conclude that who we are in linguistic community with and how closely we converge varies over different parts of language. Our linguistic communities are thus complex in the sense of being fragmented, differentiated and nonuniform. (shrink)

Popper's account of science is an endeavour in establishing the relationship between universality and truth. The idea is that the more an empirical law is universal, by precluding certain realities from obtaining in an evidentially falsifiable way, the more the law is supported by instances of its predictions being evidentially verified. The logical structure of this dynamic is captured by Popper's notion of 'corroboration'. However, this notion is suspect, for, depending on one's interpretation of evidential givenness, the relation between a (...) law's degree of universality and evidential corroborability could instead invert, thereby contradicting Popper. This paper also explores how a conceptualization of universality in terms of necessary simplicity-i.e., a measure of simplicity that is also sensitive to the evidence at hand-can better recontextualize evidential givenness to be about evidential support for a theory's predictive truth conduciveness, against Popper's understanding of evidential support for a theory's veracity concerning the evidence at hand. However, it is argued that employing necessary simplicity to attain truth conduciveness in a theory's predictions must appeal to specific background assumptions concerning the state of affairs the evidence is supposed to be about. When these background assumptions are denied as being necessarily instantiated, then a relation between necessary simplicity and truth conduciveness becomes contingently uncertain. (shrink)

This study constitutes an ethical analysis through the lens of distributive justice in the case of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), which was enacted in the midst of the Great Recession of 2007–2009. It begins by engaging with the visions of justice constructed by John Rawls and Robert Nozick, using their insights to locate the injustices of TARP according to their moral imaginations. However, this study argues that Rawls’ and Nozick’s theories of justice primarily envision the nature of law (...) as being restrictive of vice, not as instructors of virtue. Thus, it resources the legal philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas to demonstrate how the positive pedagogy of law can enable a more just construction of economic rescue legislation, one that not only prevents future repetitions of economic vices and injustice, but is also formative for a society that prizes economic justice and virtues. In doing so, the study proposes two criteria for a more just consideration of economic rescue legislation that embraces law’s positive pedagogy. (shrink)

I argue that the reception of Hegel in the sub-field of history and philosophy of science has been in part impeded by a misunderstanding of his mature metaphilosophical views. I take Alan Richardson’s influential account of the rise of scientific philosophy as an illustration of such misunderstanding, I argue that the mature Hegel’s metaphilosophical views place him much closer to the philosophers who are commonly taken as paradigms of scientific philosophy than it is commonly thought. Hegel is commonly presented as (...) someone who conceived of philosophy as a science that relied on the solitary genius of the individual thinker, and as a science whose propositions could not and should not be made accessible to “the common people”. Against this view, I argue that Hegel in fact thought that philosophy was a thoroughly anti-individualistic activity, and that he emphasized the importance of the intersubjective accessibility of philosophical discourse. I argue that when we carefully reconstruct Hegel’s reasons for his break with Schelling, and if we pay close attention to his explicit metaphilosophical pronouncements, we can see that he in fact adhered to what I call a “proto-modernist” conception of philosophy as a science. I conclude by pointing out how the mischaracterization of Hegel has served to obscure the existence of a strand of scientific philosophy that emerged by way of an immanent critique of Hegel, namely Marxist philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper, we investigate how the life and work of Louis Rougier relate to the broader political dimension of logical empiricist philosophy. We focus on three practical projects of Rougier in the 1930s and 1940s. First, his attempts to integrate French-speaking philosophers into an international network of scientific philosophers by organizing two Unity of Science conferences in Paris. Second, his role in the renewal of liberalism through the organization of the Walter Lippmann Colloquium. Third, Rougier’s attempts at political negotiations (...) between Great Britain and the Vichy regime during the Second World War. These activities of Rougier in the 1930s and 1940s have so far never been discussed as part of a unified project on Rougier’s part. Based on our investigations of these practical projects of Rougier, we argue that Rougier’s relation to logical empiricist philosophers should primarily be understood on the level of action. Rougier’s projects aimed to proliferate the concrete improvement of society and the lives of its citizens by expunging all metaphysical questions and speculations from the sphere of social discourse. Rougier conceived logical empiricist philosophers as allies to achieve such practical effects in society. (shrink)

In this paper, I criticize the thesis that value-laden approaches in American philosophy of science were marginalized in the 1960s through the editorial policy at Philosophy of Science and funding practices at the National Science Foundation. I argue that there is no available evidence of any normative restriction on philosophy of science as a domain of inquiry which excluded research on the relation between science and society. Instead, I claim that the absence of any exemplary, professional philosopher who discussed the (...) relation between science and society sufficed to narrow the focus of philosophers of science, given the institutional stabilization of the domain within professional philosophy from 1959 onwards. (shrink)

We draw attention to a series of implicit assumptions that have structured the debate about Frege’s Puzzle. Once these assumptions are made explicit, we rely on them to show that if one focuses exclusively on the issues raised by Frege cases, then one obtains a powerful consideration against a fine-grained conception of propositional-attitude content. In light of this consideration, a form of Russellianism about content becomes viable.

Tak-Lap Yeungs Arbeit verfolgt eine innovative Deutungsperspektive mit dem Versuch, Heideggers Kant-Adaption als Weg einer Umdeutung nachzuvollziehen, um eine neue Kant-Lesart stark zu machen und zugleich darüber hinaus einen von Hannah Arendt inspirierten eigenständigen Ansatz zu entwickeln, der die Rolle der Einbildungskraft als ontologische und konstitutive Instanz der Existenzorientierung zu bestimmen ermöglicht. In Ergänzung dazu zeigt diese Arbeit im Anhang einen Vergleich zwischen Heideggers Kant-Deutung und der eines chinesischen Philosophen, Mou Zongsan, auf. Der transkulturelle Hintergrund hat Yeung, der an Universitäten (...) in Hongkong und Berlin geforscht hat, dazu befähigt, die nicht deutschsprachigen Einsichten in den deutschen philosophischen Diskurs einzubringen. ////////// Tak-Lap Yeung's work pursues an innovative perspective of interpretation that aims to reconstruct Heidegger's adaptation of Kant as a method of reinterpretation. The goal of this research is to strengthen a new reading of Kant while simultaneously developing an independent approach, inspired by Arendt, that allows the role of the imagination as an ontological and constitutive instance of existential orientation to be determined. In addition, Yeung shows in the appendix a comparison between Heidegger’s and Mou Zongsan’s interpretations of Kant. The transcultural background gives Yeung, who did research in Hong Kong and Berlin, the ability to bring non-German-language insights into the German philosophical discourse. (shrink)

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt diagnosed three symptoms for the post-revolutionary, post-Enlightenment age ending in totalitarianism: 1) the obliteration of the possibility for action, i.e. for freedom; 2) the destruction of experience; and 3) the annihilation of the meaning of death. This essay tries to draw out what such Zeitdiagnose implies. I argue that for Arendt, it is not only the genuinely political that suffers irredeemably at the political as well as the societal levels of totalitarianism, but as (...) an internal correlate, the genuinely historical as well. By analyzing how the shapes of the historical metamorphosed for Arendt from Greco-Roman antiquity to Christianity, through Kant, Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche, I want to show that 1) the political modernism of Hannah Arendt carries within it a “historical modernism” and 2) such historical modernism re-embeds the present age within the Age of History by virtue of a critical distancing and a tiger’s leap into the past. (shrink)

This article accomplishes two goals. First, the paper clarifies Edmund Husserl’s investigation of the historical inception of the number system from his early works, Philosophy of Arithmetic and, “On the Logic of Signs (Semiotic)”. The article explores Husserl’s analysis of five historical developmental stages, which culminated in our ancestor’s ability to employ and enumerate with number signs. Second, the article reveals how Husserl’s conclusions about the history of the number system from his early works opens up a fusion point with (...) his investigations from his mature texts, The Crisis of the European Sciences and “The Origin of Geometry”. On the one hand, the essay shows that Husserl’s methodology was similar, as he sought in both his early and late writings to uncover the essence of the history of the formal sciences and was not executing mere intellectual history. On the other hand, the article discloses that Husserl’s insights from both time periods are strikingly analogous. Already in his early texts, Husserl saw that the sciences emerged from pre-theoretical experiences of the world and that the sciences are the result of a historical process, which involves the psychic activities of past individuals and the maintaining of discoveries over time by intersubjective communities. I conclude by showing how, in light of the analysis of this paper, we can rethink the evolution of Husserl’s philosophy. (shrink)

En el presente trabajo expongo la propuesta falsacionista de Karl Popper como resultado de su solución al problema de la inducción. En este sentido, la analizo bajo sus dos aspectos, el lógico y el metodológico. La idea detrás de ello es mostrar, en primer lugar, que su solución lógica al problema de la inducción es totalmente independiente de los criterios metodológicos que propone para la elección entre teorías rivales, y en segundo lugar, que estos últimos constituyen una transgresión a su (...) pretendida exclusión de la inducción en la práctica científica. (shrink)

In Shame and Necessity, Bernard Williams recounts that colleagues often ask why he analyses literary texts – why can’t he use examples from “real life”? He responds that “it is a perfectly good question, and it has a short answer: what philosophers will lay before themselves and their readers as an alternative to literature will not be life, but bad literature.” This anecdote contains an argument that would be readily embraced by any proponent of “post-structuralism.” Namely, it suggests that no (...) theory can solely be based on reason. Any rational account needs an – acknowledged or repressed – fictional support. We do not rely on pure concepts but rather on conceptual fictions. (shrink)

It is well appreciated that Moore, in the final years of the nineteenth century, emphatically rejected the monistic idealism of F. H. Bradley. It has, however, been less widely noticed that Moore’s concern to defeat monism remained with him well into the 1920s. In the following discussion I describe the role that Moore’s adoption of a ‘common sense’ orientation played in his criticisms of Bradley’s monism. I begin by outlining certain distinctive features of Bradley’s sceptical methodology, before describing the contrasting (...) approach of Moore as it appears in 1910-11 and 1925. I bring these methodological differences into relief by assessing the status of common sense claims in the work of each figure. I show that Moore’s common sense methodology was employed against Bradley’s monistic conclusions, and that it was adopted with Bradley squarely in mind. (shrink)

In texts such as “Richard Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn” Jürgen Habermas defends a theory that associates, on the one hand, the truth-claim raised by a speaker for a proposition p with, on the other hand, the requirement that p be “defendable on the basis of good reasons […] at any time and against anybody”. This, as is known, has been the target of criticisms by Rorty, who−in spite of agreeing with Habermas on the central tenet that the way of evaluating our (...) beliefs must be argumentative practice−declares that the only “ideal presupposed by discourse” is “that of being able to justify your beliefs to a competent audience”. We will consider two texts from 1971 -surprisingly neglected in most approaches to the debate- in which Habermas did include such a “competence condition” to elucidate the notion of truth. We will discuss whether there are good reasons to relinquish such a condition and to refer, instead, only to the formal or procedural properties of argumentative exchanges, as Habermas does in presenting the notion of “ideal speech situation”. As we will try to argue, there are no such good reasons. (shrink)

In this article I compare Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics and Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction. I try to demonstrate the similarities (focus on language and history), but moreover the differences between them. The core issue is the problem of the other, which appears in the works of both authors. Two perspectives are applied: concerning the notion of text (or tradition), and referring to the field of the political. Gadamer strives to communicate with the other (text) in the mutual understanding, although he has (...) no hope in finding a final sensus communis. Derrida emphasizes the difference underlying every thought, as well as situations of understanding as such. As a result, their visions of democracy differ – subtly, but essentially. (shrink)

This paper compares two influential but conflicting contemporary models of politics as an activity: those of Hannah Arendt and Alain Badiou. It discovers the fundamental difference between their approaches to politics in their opposing evaluations of the contemporary political significance of the legacy of Plato, Platonism, and the Platonic Idea. Karl Popper’s and Arendt’s analyses of the inherently ideological nature of totalitarianism are contrasted with Badiou’s vindication of an ideological “politics of the Idea.” Arendt and Badiou are shown to share (...) an understanding of politics as a realm for the human deployment of novelty and world-transformation. Their key disagreement concerns the form of activity that accomplishes this deployment. For Arendt, political activity has the basic form of noninstrumental and nonteleological action (praxis), devalued by the Platonic tradition of political philosophy. Badiou, by contrast, follows Plato in regarding politics essentially as a process of production (poiēsis) oriented to an ideal end. (shrink)

The life-long correspondence of David K. Lewis, one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, reveals the development, breadth, and depth of his philosophy in its historical context. The first of this two volume collection of letters focuses on his contributions to metaphysics, arguably where he made his greatest impact.

In this paper I defend the claim that Paul Feyerabend held a robust metaphilosophical position for most of his philosophical career. This position I call Decision-Based Epistemology and reconstruct it in terms of three key components: a form of epistemic voluntarism concerning the justification of philosophical positions and a behaviorist account of philosophical beliefs, which allows him to cast normative arguments concerning philosophical beliefs in scientific methodology, such as realism, in terms of means-ends relations. I then introduce non-naturalist and naturalist (...) variants of his conception of normativity, which I trace back to his mentors Viktor Kraft and Karl Popper, respectively. This distinction, introduced on the metaphilosophical level, can can be put to use to explain key changes in Feyerabend’s philosophical proposals, such as the viability of his methodological argument for realism. I conclude that this Decision-Based Epistemology should be further explored by historically embedding Feyerabend’s metaphilosophy in a voluntarist tradition of scientific philosophy. (shrink)

Ernst Cassirer's The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms fails to account properly for personalized experiences; it cannot provide a basis for understanding how some experiences become personal while others do not. Our account of personalized experience will remain lacking as long as we follow Cassirer in viewing personalized experience as a non-necessary feature of other symbolic forms such as myth, language, religion, or art; instead it must be understood that personalized experience is grounded in an independent symbolic activity as basic to (...) human cultural life as language, myth, or objectivating knowledge. This basic personalizing symbolic function is best understood as that same activity articulated in Gabriel Marcel's phenomenological descriptions of the act of "creative fidelity." Once this relationship has been grasped, it becomes possible to articulate a symbolic form of personalized experience by describing the unique way in which creative fidelity (as the personalizing symbolic function) spatializes, temporalizes, numeralizes (and as a result subjectifies/objectifies) its own distinct horizon of meaning (or: cultural world). The result will be a symbolic form, as Cassirer understands it, that is as far-reaching and fundamental to human cultural life as the three symbolic forms elaborated in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. By articulating this fourth symbolic form, we will have taken a significant step toward Cassirer's ultimate goal of a robust philosophical anthropology. (shrink)

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«بررسی استدلال دیویدسون در باب ترکیبی بودن زبان‌های طبیعی و «استدلال قلاب سنگی .