History of Western Philosophy

Wood (1970) convincingly argues that Kant’s notion of moral faith is a response to a “dialectical perplexity” or antinomy. Specifically, moral faith is a response to the threat of moral despair. In line with this suggestion, I make the case that moral faith is the resolution of a crisis about how to go on with one’s life in the face of the threat of moral despair. If this is right, then we have a potential solution to two related anxieties: (1) (...) why the matter of our moral faith or despair deserves to be a topic of practical philosophy instead of empirical psychology, and (2) how despair could be a real threat even though Kant holds that rational beings could never truly lack faith. But, to fully see how these concerns can be answered, we must go beyond Wood’s initial analysis. I first argue that Kant’s philosophy suggests two kinds of moral faith: external and internal. I then argue that internal moral faith is analogous to self-contentment (Selbstzufriedenheit) in the second Critique’s practical antinomy. Together, these arguments suggest that moral faith is a response to a real threat of moral despair, and that faith and despair dialectically require one another within practical reason. (shrink)

I discuss an important feature of the notion of cause in Post. An. 1. 13, 78b13–28, which has been either neglected or misunderstood. Some have treated it as if Aristotle were introducing a false principle about explanation; others have understood the point in terms of coextensiveness of cause and effect. However, none offers a full exegesis of Aristotle's tangled argument or accounts for all of the text's peculiarities. My aim is to disentangle Aristotle's steps to show that he is arguing (...) in favour of a logical requirement for a middle term's being the appropriate cause of its explanandum. Coextensiveness between the middle term and the attribute it explains is advanced as a sine qua non of a middle term's being an appropriate or primary cause. This condition is not restricted either to negative causes or to middle terms in second‐figure syllogisms, but ranges over all primary causes qua primary. (shrink)

Le philosophe Alain Badiou, en dialogue avec Giovanbattista Tusa, propose ici d’abandonner la thèse heideggérienne d’une unité destinale de la philosophie, sous le nom de métaphysique. Plutôt que d’affirmer qu’il n’y a pas de vérité, il s’agirait alors de reconstruire une relation entre les vérités et un absolu non transcendant. En menant une critique radicale de la doctrine de la finitude, qui nous rappelle que l’être humain est mortel et qui affirme le relativisme culturel et le caractère inachevé de tout (...) accès au vrai, le philosophe entend ainsi montrer comment le concept d’infini serait la condition des vérités universelles. (shrink)

In this work, I discuss the role of Husserl’s phenomenology in Paolo Parrini’s philosophical view. In the first section, I highlight the presence of both empiricist and constructivist elements in Parrini’s anti-foundationalist and anti-absolutist conception of knowledge. In the second section, I stress Parrini’s acknowledgement of the crucial role of phenomenology in investigating the empirical basis of knowledge, thanks to its analysis of the relationship between form and matter of cognition. In the third section, I point at some lines of (...) development of phenomenology that are revealed by Parrini’s reflection, through the comparison between Husserl’s genetic phenomenology, Mary Hesse’s network model, and the tradition of neutral monism. (shrink)

In the mid-twentieth century, Jérome Gaïth drew attention to the possible influence of Plotinus’ Enneads VI 8 (39) on Gregory of Nyssa’s theory of Divine will. In this treatise, despite being aware of the inappropriateness of all language to describe the One, Plotinus ascribes to it the classical traits of human action: will, freedom, self-determination, though raised to an absolute degree. In the present study we will analyse the reception and transformation of this theory in Nyssen and its anthropological corollaries, (...) in which he extends the virtuality of human freedom to an ontological level. (shrink)

What would Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz have said about today’s problem of consciousness? Some philosophers claim that Leibniz was one of the first to argue that there is an ‘explanatory gap’ between our knowledge of matter and our knowledge of consciousness, and that he thought this posed a problem for materialism (see for example Churchland 1995: 191-2; Kriegel 2015: 49; Seager 1991; Searle 1983: 267-8). This is supposed to be the point of the famous passage in the Monadology (1714), in which (...) Leibniz argues that perception is ‘inexplicable in terms of mechanical reasons’... (shrink)

The peculiar emphases of Gregory of Nyssa’s thought earned him all kinds of charges, in his own lifetime and onwards: among others, that he falls into Tritheism, Modalism, Synergism, Pelagianism or Semi-Pelagianism. The purpose of this paper is to interpret one of these theoretical audacities. It can be found in a passage from his late treatise De vita Moysis (II 86), where he refers to the evils suffered by the Egyptians in the book of Exodus, and he attributes their cause (...) to human decision (proaíresis). He affirms there that Divine Justice itself ‘is consequent’ or ‘follows’ (epakolouthoûsa) human decisions according to their merit. Although at this point Gregory follows closely Origen’s exegesis – which tried to rebut the determinism of certain Gnostic schools by affirming the true self-government of the soul, even regarding salvation or damnation, he goes beyond his Alexandrian predecessor and his Greek sources concerning the real autonomy of human actions, in interpersonal correspondence between the human and the divine. (shrink)

El presente trabajo se concentra en el debate acerca de los alcances de la providencia que tuvo lugar entre las escuelas estoica, platónica y peripatética entre las siglos I y III de nuestra era. En ese contexto, analiza el problema del status ontológico de los singulares en Orígenes de Alejandría y Nemesio de Émesa. Influidos primariamente por la síntesis filoniana entre las distintas teorías griegas de providencia y la de las Escrituras, estos autores fundan la consistencia de los singulares en (...) la tesis de una acción directa del principio divino sobre cada uno de ellos. Frente a una cierta tendencia universalista y necesitarista del pensamiento clásico, los Padres griegos intentaron rescatar el valor metafísico del individuo en cuanto tal. -/- The present paper focuses on the debate over the scope of Providence that took place among the Stoic, Platonic and Peripatetic schools between the first and the third centuries AD. In that context, it deals with the problem of the ontological status of the singulars in the thought of Origen of Alexandria and Nemesius of Emesa. Influenced primarily by the Philonian synthesis of the different Greek theories of Providence with that of the Scriptures, Origen and Nemesius ground the consistency of individual beings on the thesis of a direct divine action intended for each of them. Faced with the universalistic and necessitarian tendencies of classical thought, the Greek Fathers tried to rescue the metaphysical value of individuals as such. (shrink)

Humanists and philosophers in the Quattrocento find inspiration for their treatises on human dignity not only in Classical Antiquity, but also in the works of the Church Fathers. The present paper examines the influence of the latter on the theories of freedom at the dawn of Modernity, especially regarding the Patristic conception of human self as person or hypostasis, whose free decision is considered inviolable, creative and irreducible to its own nature or essence.

One of the great values of the Immanuel Kant Lectures is that it sheds new light on the nature of Quine’s views about behaviorism. Where Quine’s linguistic behaviorism is well-known, the Lectures contain one of his most detailed discussions of behaviorism in psychology and the philosophy of mind. Quine clarifies the nature of his psychological commitments by arguing for a view that is quite modest: he argues against ‘excessively restrictive’ variants of behaviorism while maintaining that ‘a good measure of behaviorist (...) discipline is still needed to keep [our mental] terms under control’. In this paper, I use Quine’s comments in the Lectures to reconstruct his position. I start by distinguishing three types of behaviorism in psychology and the philosophy of mind: ontological behaviorism, logical behaviorism, and epistemological behaviorism. Next, I reconstruct Quine’s perspective on each of these views and argue that he does not fully accept any of them. Finally, I combine these perspectives and reconstruct Quine’s subtle view about behaviorism in psychology. (shrink)

B. F. Skinner and W. V. Quine, arguably the two most influential proponents of behaviorism in mid-twentieth century psychology and philosophy, are often considered to be brothers in arms. They were close friends, they had remarkably parallel careers, and they both identified as behaviorists. Yet, surprisingly little is known about the relation between the two. The question as to how the two influenced each other often comes up, but is standardly dealt with by rehearsing the few remarks on the issue (...) in Skinner’s and Quine’s autobiographies. How did Skinner and Quine develop their varieties of behaviorism? In what ways did they affect each other? And how similar are their behaviorisms to begin with? In this paper, I shed new light on the relation between Skinner and Quine by infusing the debate with a wide range of new and previously unexamined evidence. Examining a large set of documents—correspondence, notes, datebooks, drafts, lectures, and teaching material—from the personal and academic archives of Skinner and Quine, I reconstruct (1) how they acquired their ‘behaviorisms’ in their student years, (2) how they developed their views in the first three decades of their careers, and (3) the ways in which they were influenced by the psychologists and philosophers of their time. (shrink)

Stimulated by a general salience of neuroscientific research and the declaration of neuroscience as one of the leading disciplines of the current century, a diversity of disciplines from the social sciences and the humanities have engaged in discussions about the role of the brain in various social and cultural phenomena. The general importance assigned to the brain in so many areas of academic and social life nowadays has been called the ‘neuroscientific turn’. One of the fields that gained particular attention (...) in this context is neuroethics. It is, however, not clear if neuroethics should be regarded simply as an indicator of a change toward a brain-centered anthropological outlook in Western societies or as an entity that itself plays a crucial role in the development and promotion of this outlook. In this chapter, we present two perspectives on the ‘neuroscientific turn’, sketch a landscape of neuroethics, and scrutinize the current state and development of neuroethics as one of the new fields at the intersection between the neurosciences and the humanities. We will ask to what extent neuroethics is itself a product or a booster of a cultural turn toward neuroscience and which interpretations of neuroscientific knowledge and which public expectations of the potential of neuroscience have actually been put to work in the formation of neuroethics. As our analysis underlines, the interactions of neuroscience and ethics in the field of neuroethics are complex and multidirectional. On the one hand, philosophical and anthropological discourse has favored certain theoretical assumptions about the role of the brain for human self-understanding. On the other hand, neuroscience has stimulated many discourses in ethical theory, as well as in society, of which neuroethics can be regarded as a recent derivative. Finally, neuroethics itself occasionally functions as an amplifier of the assumption that neuroscience provides relevant information to help us understand the nature of human morality and the nature of good social norms and institutions. (shrink)

Le climat politique actuel en France abonde de débats à propos de l’identité nationale et du voile; en fait, le voile est devenu un symbole séparant l’idée d’une nation française et d’une nation islamique. Cependant, peu d’attention est portée sur la façon dont la perception de la différence de la femme est essentielle à la formation du citoyen français. Au lieu de se demander simplement “que veut dire être Français?” une seconde interrogation devrait suivre sur la façon dont se construit (...) la femme voilée dans la société française. En faisant appel à la philosophie de Hegel, les réflexions philosophiques employées pour ce projet cherchent à poser de nouvelles questions pouvant éclairer le débat sur l’identité nationale: la femme voilée est-elle l’Antigone des temps modernes? Quel est l’enjeu de dévoiler la femme voilée? D’où vient ce désir de la dévoiler? (shrink)

One of the longest and most acrimonious polemics in the history of philosophy is between Antoine Arnauld and Nicolas Malebranche. Their central disagreements are over the nature of ideas, theodicy, and, the topic of this paper, grace. We offer the most in-depth English language treatment of their discussion of grace to date. Our focus is one particular aspect of the polemic: the power of finite agents to assent to grace. We defend two theses. First, we show that as the debate (...) progresses, the differences between Arnauld and Malebranche become, surprisingly, less pronounced—despite mutual accusations of Pelagianism and Calvinism. Our second thesis is developed to explain the outcome of the first. We argue that the employment of different methodologies to interrogate the relationship between efficacious grace and human power prohibits any possibility of reconciliation between Arnauld and Malebranche. (shrink)

How does Descartes characterize the peculiar way in which each of us is aware of our bodies? I argue that Descartes recognizes a sense of bodily ownership, such that the body sensorily appears to be one's own in bodily awareness. This sensory appearance of ownership is ubiquitous, for Descartes, in that bodily awareness always confers a sense of ownership. This appearance is confused, in so far as bodily awareness simultaneously represents the subject as identical to, partially composed by, and united (...) to her body, without distinguishing these relations. Finally, the appearance of ownership is grounded in multiple other ways in which the body sensorily appears: namely, in the fact that the body appears to be inescapable, modified by bodily sensations, and an object of special concern. (shrink)